Falsifying history: Voltaire’s lost reply to David Boullier on Pascal and Locke

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Voltaire’s supposed letter to ’s Gravesande of 1741 was written for publication after ’s Gravesande’s death. It is thus Voltaire’s reply to David Boullier’s critique of the Lettres philosophiques. The willingness of Voltaire scholars to mistake this for a genuine letter results from a naïve desire to avoid acknowledging Voltaire’s habit of falsifying the historical record. An appendix argues that Letter Twenty-Five of the Lettres philosophiques, on Pacal, was influenced by a reading of Pope’s Essay on Man.

KEYWORDS:

• Voltaire
• Boullier
• Pascal
• Locke
• Pope

Of all Voltaire’s early prose writings none were more important in the eyes of contemporaries than the twenty-fifth of the Lettres philosophiques (1734) – the long letter on Pascal – and the early draft of the letter on Locke, often known as the Lettre sur l’âme (replaced by Letter Thirteen in the same book in the forlorn hope of placating the censors), which was first published (without Voltaire’s permission) in a journal in 1736 and in a book in 1738.¹ Both texts were subject to extensive attacks by contemporaries, for they were understood to imply the rejection of two fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion, the Fall in the case of Letter Twenty-Five and the immortality of the soul in the case of the Lettre sur l’âme. The standard view is that Voltaire never replied in print to those attacks. He is supposed to have published little of significance on Pascal between 1734 and his notes to Condorcet’s edition of the Pensées in 1778: all there is, it would seem, with the exception of a very short addition to Letter 25 in 1739 and a more substantial addition in 1742, is the occasional passing reference, along with, of necessity, Pascal’s appearance in the catalogue of authors which forms part of the Siècle de Louis XIV.² As for the essay on the soul, Voltaire is supposed never to have referred to it in print, not even to acknowledge its existence.³ All this, I will argue, is false.

How can there be a lost reply from Voltaire to his most important critic, the Protestant theologian David Boullier, who had attacked both the letter on Pascal and the letter on the soul? The answer is simple: Voltaire’s reply has been misclassified since the great Kehl edition of 1784, the first major posthumous edition of his works, as a private letter, not a public intervention. Two major opportunities to correct that error were missed. Theodore Besterman published three editions of Voltaire’s correspondence. The third, known as the definitive edition, contains the authoritative edition of the text I will be discussing: but Besterman should have realised that what had long passed as a private letter was not a letter at all.⁴ Besterman was in many respects a naive reader of Voltaire’s texts; indeed Voltaire scholarship has (as I have argued at length elsewhere) been bedevilled by naive readings.⁵ The second opportunity came with the publication of what was intended to be the definitive edition of the Lettres philosophiques, edited under the overall supervision of Nicholas Cronk.⁶ There are serious problems with Cronk’s edition, which again I have discussed elsewhere: in general he was too willing to follow in the footsteps of Gustave Lanson, whose edition of 1909 was the standard reference point until the publication of Cronk’s own edition.⁷ On this particular point, he relied not on Lanson but on Besterman, although Besterman’s error should have been evident.

Before we proceed it is important to grasp two conventions which will seem alien to anglophone readers. First, the Lettres philosophiques had been banned by both the Parlement and the government. This meant that it was illegal to print or sell a copy; but not illegal to own or even to buy a copy. (Voltaire was horrified when in 1766 a copy of his Dictionnaire philosophique was burnt along with the body of François-Jean de la Barre, as if ownership of his book were itself a crime.) In principle then there was nothing to prevent readers of the Lettres philosophiques debating Voltaire’s text, and indeed that was true as far as conversations, private letters, and even sermons were concerned. But it was also a convention that no text could be approved for publication if it named a banned book. The most striking example of this is Voltaire’s letter to the Académie française of 1776 in which he protested that no one was giving him credit for having introduced the French to Shakespeare. He was referring, of course, to the Lettres philosophiques, but he never mentions the work by name. The Académie printed his letter but could not get permission to distribute it, as the implicit reference to the Lettres philosophiques was too obvious; Voltaire was trying to smuggle discussion of a banned book into an official publication. As a result, Voltaire had to publish the letter himself, in Geneva.⁸

This convention meant that the first works which appeared attacking the Lettres philosophiques had to pretend to have been published abroad, and could not receive an approbation. Cronk understands this convention very well, but he fails to notice that it was subject to a remarkable breach: in 1753, and again in 1754, David Renaud Boullier’s attack on the Lettres philosophiques (named explicitly in the title) was published in Paris with an approbation. The printer provided a short preface:

M. de Voltaire est assez peu ménagé dans les Pieces suivantes, & on dira peut-être que la réputation qu’il s’est acquise méritoit plus d’égards; mais je ne sai si un Ecrivain qui en témoigne lui-même si peu pour les personnes les plus respectables, & pour les choses les plus sacrées, a dû légitimement s’attendre qu’on en conserveroit beaucoup pour lui.⁹

The approbation is dated 7 December 1752; Voltaire had fled Frederick the Great’s Prussia, and the French government had refused to let him return to France. The publication of Boullier’s Lettres critiques sur les Lettres philosophiques de Mr de Voltaire with an approbation effectively declared Voltaire an outlaw in the world of French letters, someone who could be vilified publicly and whose banned books could be named providing they were roundly condemned. This does not just mark a shift in Voltaire’s relations with the French authorities; it is also an index of growing tensions over the spread of philosophical ideas for this was also the year in which publication of the Encyclopédie was first halted.

The second convention we need to bear in mind is that in France (unlike England) it was regarded as dishonouring for an author to reply to his critics, who must be treated as if they were beneath contempt. Voltaire insisted that he reserved the right to reply to attacks on his personal character, but he maintained he would never respond to anyone criticising his published works on aesthetic or philosophical grounds.¹⁰ It should not surprise us then that Voltaire would seem never to have replied to criticisms of the Lettres philosophiques. Except he did; in order to do so, as we shall see, he had to find a way of replying which he could claim was not in fact a reply, and he had to do so without actually mentioning the text he was defending.

So much for background. Voltaire’s reply takes the form of a letter to the Dutch Newtonian mathematician and natural philosopher Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande (D2519).¹¹ It is directed at the first (1741) publication in Amsterdam of Boullier’s Défense des Pensées de Pascal contre la critique de Mr de Voltaire, et trois Lettres relatives à la philosophie de ce poète (the same work given an approbation in 1753) in volume 2 of his Lettres sur les vrais principes de la religion, a work in which Boullier also criticises the Lettre sur l’âme, the most radical statement of Voltaire’s views on the soul, which by the end of 1740 had appeared seven times in print, thanks to Voltaire’s enemies, who sought to publicise his irreligion.¹² Boullier’s critique was to prove the most successful attack on the irreligion of the Lettres philosophiques, going through ten editions.¹³ Voltaire’s letter was published with the first ‘authorised’ edition of Voltaire’s play Mahomet (Amsterdam: Ledet, 1743): production of the play had been banned in Paris, so the first unauthorised publications claimed to have been printed in Brussels (where Voltaire was living) and Voltaire’s own authorised publication had to appear in Amsterdam. The word ‘authorised’ here needs to be placed in inverted commas. Voltaire carefully supervised the publication; but in appearance the volume was edited by ‘P.D.L.M.’. (P.D.L.M. is taken to stand for the Abbé de la Marre, who had died in 1742. In fact César de Missy served as Voltaire’s intermediary with the publisher.) Thus, nominally, Voltaire’s private letter to ’s Gravesande had made its way into print without his authorisation: he had replied without replying. The letter to ’s Gravesande might at first sight seem to have nothing to do with Mahomet, but for Voltaire and his readers they had a common subject: religious fanaticism and its dangers.

Since Cronk discusses the response to the Lettres philosophiques in the 1740s and 1750s, including Boullier’s work, Voltaire’s reply to Boullier should have fallen within his remit.¹⁴ Moreover, since this was the only occasion in which Voltaire referred to the printing of the Lettre sur l’âme, the letter to ’s Gravesande is germane to the discussion of that letter which is printed (edited by Gianluca Mori and Antony McKenna) as volume 6C of the same four-tome edition. Both Cronk (OCV 6B:553n) and McKenna and Mori (OCV6C:5–6n, 32n–33n) are familiar with the letter to ‘s Gravesande, but they refer to it as if it were a private letter, not mentioning that it appeared (repeatedly) in print with Voltaire’s authorisation.¹⁵ The same is true of the longest discussion of the letter that I have found, in Arnoux Straudo’s study of the reception of Pascal in eighteenth-century France.¹⁶

The next step, it would seem, would be to outline the contents of the letter. But, as so often with Voltaire, matters are not as straightforward as at first they seem. For it is my conviction that the letter to ’s Gravesande is a fictional letter – that it was written after ’s Gravesande had died (28 February 1742) and was never truly addressed to him.¹⁷ The evidence for this is overwhelming:

1. The manuscript sent by Voltaire to César de Missy for inclusion in the edition of Mahomet survives. Besterman described this as a copy (of, presumably, a draft or copy of the original, sent to ’s Gravesande) with Voltaire’s corrections (D2519). But as soon as one looks at the numerous corrections it is apparent that Voltaire was not correcting the copyist but revising the text. It is not impossible that Voltaire would revise for publication a letter he had previously written and sent; but this letter does not form part of an ongoing correspondence with ’s Gravesande, and we do not have either the letter from ’s Gravesande to which it is supposedly a reply, or a response from ’s Gravesande. The first indication we have of the existence of the letter to ’s Gravesande is César de Missy’s letter of 18 November 1742 (D2689), which replies to a letter from Voltaire of 10 November (D2682) accompanying a package: we only learn that the package contained the letter to ’s Gravesande from César de Missy’s reply. It should be immediately obvious that the surviving manuscript might be a fictitious letter which had been dictated by Voltaire to an amanuensis and then revised with the sole purpose of supplying a suitable text for César de Missy’s publication.

2. This possibility turns into a certainty when we consider the problem of the dating. Besterman followed the manuscript sent to César de Missy, which dates the letter à Bruxelles ce premier aoust 1741; it was first published as being written A Cirey, le 1 de Juin 1741. In the Kehl edition it was dated A Cirey, le 1 de Juin 1738. The problem is that none of these dates work. The Kehl date must be wrong because Voltaire is replying to a book published in 1741. The first edition must be wrong because Voltaire was in Brussels not Cirey in June/August 1741. And the manuscript cannot be right because the letter starts by discussing experiments in Voltaire’s chambre obscure as if they were ongoing. Now Voltaire had a camera obscura constructed at Cirey to study Newtonian light theory, and he was conducting experiments in it in 1738 (this is one reason, presumably, for the Kehl dating); he had no camera obscura in Brussels, moreover by 1741 he had long given up experimental physics, leaving the field clear for Mme du Châtelet.¹⁸ Thus there are insuperable objections to dating the letter either to Cirey in 1738, or to either Brussels or Cirey in 1741.

3. In any case, the letter makes no sense as a letter sent to ’s Gravesande. Apart from this letter we only have three letters from Voltaire to ’s Gravesande, and one letter from ’s Gravesande to Voltaire. The other letters are stiff and formal. They discuss books, not experiments. This letter is delightfully wicked, which is unimaginable in a letter sent to ’s Gravesande, who embodied Newtonian orthodoxy and religious propriety. On this ground alone one would have to suspect the letter was not genuine. Moreover, we are required to believe that Voltaire had relied on ’s Gravesande to supply him with a copy of Boullier’s book, although Voltaire had excellent contacts in the Dutch book trade, and had no need to depend on ’s Gravesande; moreover the book was unlikely to have been of interest to ’s Gravesande, whose preoccupations were mathematical. We are also required to believe that ’s Gravesande had sent Voltaire details of a sophisticated apparatus which he had yet to describe in print, which implies an ongoing correspondence about experiments for which there is no evidence and a trusting relationship between the two which is entirely implausible.

4. Such suspicions are reinforced when we look at the letter in the context of the 1743 edition of Mahomet. That edition opens with a letter about Mahomet written by Voltaire to Frederick II. The status of the letter is ambiguous: Besterman (D2386) published the text as a letter because Voltaire so described it (though giving it a very different date) both in a letter to d’Alembert (D2683) and in a letter to César de Missy (D2682). But it was originally written, and sent to Frederick for his approval, as a dedicatory epistle, and the editors of the Oxford edition volume for Mahomet reprint it as part of the printed text of Mahomet (OCV20B:149–155). In 1743 it could not be published as a dedicatory epistle (though Voltaire described it to César de Missy as une espèce d’épitre dédicatoire, while insisting it was a real letter) because that would have meant acknowledging that the edition was being edited by Voltaire himself, whilst as we have seen the fiction was that the edition was being produced without his knowledge or participation. Thus Mahomet in its first ‘authorised’ edition is sandwiched between two letters that are not really letters at all; the first is really a dedicatory epistle; the second is a pure fiction.

5. Such suspicions can only be confirmed when one notices that from 1748 the fictitious letter to ’s Gravesande was replaced by another fictitious correspondence, in which Voltaire wrote to Pope Benedict XIV sending him a copy of Mahomet, and the pope replied praising the play (D3210). The key passage in the pope’s reply was fabricated (although, characteristically, Besterman refused to acknowledge this); one fiction was replaced by another more blatant and shocking one (OCV20B:159–160n).

None of these objections to the authenticity of the letter to ’s Gravesande occurred to Besterman, who always saw Voltaire in the best possible light. But since the publication of Besterman’s edition of the letters it has been demonstrated that Voltaire fabricated a long run of letters supposedly written from Berlin to Madame Denis (OCV45C). Voltaire inveighed at length and vehemently against those who falsified the historical record (OCV31B:351–428), while happily doing so himself. That he should have fabricated a letter to ’s Gravesande is entirely in character.

When was Voltaire’s fictional letter written? We have so far identified three crucial dates: the publication of Boullier’s Lettres sur les vrais principes de la religion (announced in the Mercure de France of June 1741 – hence perhaps the redating of the letter on publication to 1 June rather than 1 August, since by August copies of Boullier’s book would have been widely available); ’s Gravesande’s death, 28 February 1742; and the letter to César de Missy of 10 November 1742. There is another crucial date: the publication of ’s Gravesande’s description of the heliostat, the mechanical device for projecting a fixed image of the moving sun on the wall of a camera obscura that he had supposedly described to Voltaire in a previous letter, for if Voltaire invented the correspondence he must have read ’s Gravesande’s description, which appeared in print early in 1742.¹⁹ The heliostat evidently delighted Voltaire for it enabled him to make the naughty joke with which his letter begins, that ’s Gravesande was the first person since Joshua to make the sun stand still. All of these dates are compatible with the conclusion that Voltaire fabricated the letter in order to send it to César de Missy, and the ‘corrected copy’ on which Besterman based his published text is thus not in fact a copy but the original.

It is worth noting that César de Missy (unlike generations of Voltaire scholars) was not taken in for a moment by the letter to ’s Gravesande. He praised it as a comic attack on fanaticism, fit to stand beside the tragic fanaticism of Mahomet:

Votre lettre à Monsieur s’Gravesande fera fort bien à la suite de Mahomet. Moyennant cette addition on aura après la Tragédie la petite Pièce: Et le personnage [i.e. Boullier] qui est joué gaîment dans la petite, n’assortira pas mal le personage qui est joué sérieusement dans la grande. J’avois lu son livre. Vous m’en avez vangé par votre lettre. Je vous en dois mes remercimens. (D2689)

Thus César de Missy read the letter to ’s Gravesande as a comedy (for la petite pièce was traditionally a comedy), and thus implicitly as a fiction. And he went on to criticise part of the argument, with the obvious implication that it was not too late for Voltaire to rewrite it.²⁰

Now, at last, we can turn to the contents of the letter, which is not a serious rebuttal of Boullier, but (as César de Missy saw) a mockery of him. Boullier, Voltaire insists, is long-winded and, by implication, tedious, while Voltaire’s own discussion of Pascal had been succinct (less than a sheet of printed paper, he claims, although in the first edition it occupies more than four sheets, or 96 pages; in the 1739 edition it occupies 3.5 sheets, or 53 pages). As for Pascal, had he lived he would have rejected many of his own pensées. Voltaire took the opportunity to update his critique of Pascal, drawing upon a 1728 publication of previously unpublished pensées.²¹ Voltaire borrowed the relevant volume from the royal library in 1735, and apparently wrote an addition to Letter 25 in 1738, an addition which was not published until 1742.²² He draws upon some of the same material in the letter to ’s Gravesande. Moreover, Voltaire maintains, Pascal went mad: in the last year(s) of his life he was convinced that there was an abyss beside his chair.²³ Here Voltaire was drawing upon a report published by Jean-Jacques Boileau in 1737.²⁴

But the key point, Voltaire insists, is that we do not live in a world corrupted by sin:

Le fonds de mes petites notes sur les pensées de Pascal c’est qu’il faut croire sans doute au péché originel puisque la foy l’ordonne et qu’il faut y croire d’autant plus que la raison est absolument impuissante à nous aprendre que la nature humaine est déchue.²⁵ La révélation seule peut nous l’aprendre: Platon s’y étoit jadis cassé le nez. Comment pouvoit il savoir que les hommes avoient été autrefois plus baux, plus grand, plus fort, qu’ils avoient eu de belles ailes, et qu’ils avoient fait des enfans sans femmes?²⁶ Tous ceux qui se sont servis de la phisique pour prouver la décadence de ce petit globe de notre monde n’ont pas eu meilleur fortune que Platon. Voyez vous ces vilaines montagnes? disoient ils, ces mers qui entrent dans les terres? ces lacs sans issue? Ce sont de débris d’un globe maudit. Mais quand on y a regardé de plus près, on a vu que ces montagnes étoient nécessaires pour nous donner des rivières et des mines, et que ce sont de perfections d’un monde bénit.

… .

C’est une étrange rage, que celle de quelques messieurs qui veullent absolument que nous soyons misérables. Je n’aime point un charlatan qui veut me faire acroire que je suis malade pour me vendre ses pillules. Garde ta drogue mon amy et laisse moy ma santé, mais pourquoy me dis tu des injures par ce que je me porte bien, et que je ne veut point de ton orviétan?

Note how close Voltaire comes to saying that this is the best of all possible worlds. If one accepts Besterman’s dating, Voltaire first envisaged writing Letter 25 of the Lettres philosophiques a few days after receiving (and surely reading) the first two parts of Pope’s Essay on Man (D609; D617; see the Appendix). Pope had shown him how to construct a semi-Christian account of human nature which excluded any reference to original sin or man’s inherent wickedness, and this becomes (on his own account) Voltaire’s central argument against Pascal.²⁷ By the time he wrote the letter to ’s Gravesande Voltaire will also have been familiar with Leibniz’s Theodicée, to which he refers implicitly. His rejection of the doctrine of original sin required him to stress that this is not un globe maudit; in other contexts though he was already keen to acknowledge the presence of unnecessary suffering in the world.²⁸ We may take this as an example of what might be termed Voltaire’s oppositional mode of argument: he is much more interested in rebutting the view that he opposes than he is in stating in clear terms a view that he thinks is true.

The second key argument is that we must recognise the limits of our understanding:

Plus je relis Loke, et plus je voudrois que tous ces messieurs l’étudiassent. Il me semble qu’il a fait comme Auguste qui donna un édit, de coercendo intra fines imperio. Loke a resserée l’empire de la science pour l’affermir. Qu’esce que l’âme? je n’en sçais rien. Qu’esce que la matière? je n’en sçais rien. Voilà Joseph Leibnits qui a découvert que la matière est un assemblage de monades. Soit. Je ne le comprends pas ny luy non plus. Eh bien mon âme sera une monade! Ne me voilà t’il pas bien instruit? Je vais vous prouver que vous êtes immortels, me dit mon docteur, mais vraiment il me fera plaisir. J’ay tout aussi grande envie que luy d’être immortel. Je n’ay fait la Henriade que pour cela. Mais mon homme se croit bien plus sûr de l’immortalité par ses arguments que moy par ma Henriade.

… 

Mesurer, peser, calculer, voilà ce qu’a faittes Neuton, voilà ce que vous [’s Gravesande] faites avec monsieur Mushembrock. Mais pour les premiers principes des choses nous n’en sçavons pas plus qu’Epistémon et maître Editue. Les philosophes qui font de sistème sur la secrette construction de l’univers, sont comme nos voiageurs qui vont à Contantinople et qui parlent du serrail; il n’en ont vu que les dehors, et ils prétendent savoir ce que fait le sultan avec ses favorites.

Because Voltaire disowns the Lettre sur l’âme in the letter he has to avoid adopting any of its characteristic arguments. Where the Lettre sur l’âme emphasises our similarity to other animals, here he simply avoids presenting arguments for or against immortality, while effectively insinuating that he has no hope of life after death, and that all sensible people should share his view.

Voltaire’s conclusion is that we are (metaphorically) blind when it comes to understanding the secret construction of the universe. Unlike Boullier, he at least recognises the limits of his own knowledge. He is a sophisticated blind person, a blind Parisian, while Boullier is a blind provincial – a distinctly unfair comment, for Boullier had been a Huguenot minister in London from 1723 to 1734, and was currently a minister in Amsterdam, two cities that could hardly be dismissed as provincial. Voltaire (despite being currently in Brussels) is thus implicitly appealing to a philosophical geography, in which the Enlightenment is represented by Paris, and Christianity by the provinces.

Does restoring the (fictitious) letter to ’s Gravesande to the vast array of Voltaire’s publications make a difference to our understanding of either the Lettres philosophiques or of Voltaire? It does. First it states explicitly that the crux of his quarrel with Pascal is over the doctrine of original sin. Second, it states explicitly that Locke’s great achievement is to recognise the limits of human understanding. Both of these are very helpful for understanding what he is about in the Lettres philosophiques.

We should note the care with which Voltaire restricts the debate to two points and two points only. Just as he omits much of the content of the Lettre sur l’âme, he also omits an important argument he had pursued in Letter Twenty-Five. There (despite having declared his intention to avoid arguments that touched on the fundamental doctrines of Christianity: D617) he had mocked Pascal’s claim to be able to show that Christ was the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament.²⁹ In doing so he was following the example of a book published by Étienne Fourmont, Lettre de R. Ismaël Ben Abraham, juif converti, à m. l'abbé Houteville, sur son livre intitulé: ‘La Religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits’ (Paris, 1722). Fourmont’s book, which obtained an approbation and privilege, pretends to be written by a Jewish convert to Christianity, but argues that Houtteville, whose book had been a great success, had completely failed to produce arguments which would convince a well-informed Jew that Jesus was the Messiah. Fourmont pretended to write more in sorrow than in anger, while destroying one of the essential pillars of Christian belief. Voltaire had written to Thieriot on 30 novembre 1722 (D132): ‘J'ai lu à Orleans la réponse à l'abbé Dhouteville qui me paroit bien plus écritte contre la relligion que contre cet abbé. Je ne sçai pas pourquoy vous méprisez ce livre … ’ Thus he had learnt from Fourmont (amongst others) how to write against a defender of Christianity while pretending to remain a Christian and while seeming blissfully unaware of the implications of his own arguments.³⁰ Defending himself against Boullier, however, Voltaire sought to offer no hostages; claiming that man’s fallen nature was a matter of faith not reason was reasonably safe; arguing that Jesus could not be shown to be the Messiah was not, and Voltaire would not return to problems of Biblical exegesis until after 1762, the year of the Sermon des cinquante.

We should also note that Voltaire was not concerned to be entirely consistent with his own arguments elsewhere. He already knew there were powerful objections to the best of all possible worlds argument, but he implies he accepts it. His emphasis that Locke’s key role was to emphasise the limits of human understanding is at odds with the thrust of the Elements of Newton’s Philosophy (1738) and the Metaphysics of Newton (1740), in which he himself had been prepared to propound, however cautiously, a system on the secret construction of the universe. The letter, with its catchphrase Vanitas vantitatum, et métaphysica vanitas, thus marks a key stage in Voltaire’s retreat from metaphysical Newtonianism.

At the same time the forceful rejection of Leibniz points to the growing tensions in his relationship with Mme du Châtelet (he was to begin his long alliance with Mme Denis in 1744), tensions made worse by her conversion to Leibnizianism. Indeed the whole letter may be taken as a rejection of her efforts to bring him back within officially respectable French intellectual life, for Voltaire makes absolutely clear his rejection of the Biblical account of the creation and fall of humankind, expressing himself much more forcefully and directly than he had done in the Lettres philosophiques. Living at Cirey, within the jurisdiction of France, Voltaire had actively sought an accommodation with the Jesuits. Now, outside French jurisdiction (because Mme du Châtelet was residing in Brussels in order to pursue a court case), he expressed his hostility to revealed religion more forcefully than he had previously done in print, while at the same time carefully avoiding entangling himself in the theological disputes that had delighted Fourmont.

Lastly, the letter opens up a new dispute with Pascal. Pascal, Voltaire has now discovered, had written:

Si selon les lumières naturelles il y a un dieu, il n'a ny bornes, il n'a aucun raport à nous; nous sommes donc incapables de connaître nie ce qu'il est, ny s'il est.

and again:

Je ne me sentirois pas assez de force pour trouver dans la nature de quoy convaincre des athées.

It is important to realise that passages as profoundly sceptical as this were not to be found in the text of the Pensées as published in the eighteenth century; there the text of Pascal’s wager is altered so that the reader can assume they are wagering on whether God will reward or punish in the next life, not on whether a creator God exists.³¹ In reponse to this new, sceptical Pascal Voltaire allied himself with Locke, Clarke, and Wolff: he would always insist that the universe demonstrated the workings of an intelligence, and we see here an indication of his future conflict with the materialist atheism of a d’Holbach. The problem with Pascal is not only that he accepts revealed religion; it is also that he is soft on atheism. Thus the fictitious letter to ’s Gravesande marks the first occasion on which Voltaire marks out in print what might be termed his mature position on religion: the rejection of revealed religion and belief in immortality (and hence of theism), but equally the rejection of a Lucretian atheism which denies the existence of some sort of intelligence at work in the universe. Voltaire dropped the passage in editions of the Oeuvres from 1748, surely because he had made the same point in the addition to Letter 25 which first appeared in 1742, but now appeared alongside the letter to ’s Gravesande.

Indeed in 1748 Voltaire dropped all the quotations from Pascal. The result, in this second version of the letter, is a reply to Pascal as defended by Boullier in which neither Pascal nor Boullier gets to speak in his own voice. The traditional academic debate had taken the form of a dialogue in which long quotations from the text being rebutted were presented along with the author’s response; this was still the form of Letter 25. But Voltaire’s reply to Boullier now takes the form of a monologue in which only Voltaire speaks. In place of the passages from Pascal which he had wished to display as ridiculous we now get the following sentence (not printed by Besterman): ‘Les hommes d’une imagination forte, comme Pascal, parlent avec une autorité despotique; les ignorants & les faibles écoutent avec une admiration servile; les bons esprits examinent.’³² Where in 1743 Voltaire had invited his readers to examine with him what Pascal had said, he now writes with a despotic authority of his own, demanding that his readers accept his judgement without dispute. Was he aware that his description of ‘men with a powerful imagination’ could be taken to be a self-portrait? Presumably not. The final version of the text embodies a peculiar paradox of Voltaire’s version of Enlightenment: the principle of examination, of critique, of debate is held high, but in practice a vast range of opinion is dismissed as not worthy of discussion or debate. Voltaire’s claim in 1743 was that reading Boullier was a waste of time; by 1748 this was true even of reading Pascal. Indeed the evolution of Voltaire’s engagement with Pascal tells us a good deal about his sense of his audience. In 1734 Pascal was someone to be taken seriously and engaged with; in 1743 he was both to be engaged with and mocked; by 1748 he was simply to be mocked; and finally in 1778 he was an historical monument: De tant de disputeurs éternels, Pascal est seul resté, parce que seul il était un homme de génie. Il est encore debout sur les ruines de son siècle.³³ The shift in Voltaire’s attitude to Pascal reflects the shifting importance of Jansenism within French culture; as it declined Voltaire’s relationship to Pascal went from antagonism, through contempt, to grudging respect.³⁴

Voltaire’s reply to Boullier was published over and over and over again; it is a peculiar achievement of modern scholarship, a consequence of relying on posthumous editions of Voltaire’s works, to have lost track of these numerous republications. For contemporaries it will have been a significant document which belonged, not to Voltaire’s correspondence, but to his published Works; for modern scholars it has become nearly invisible, and its record of repeated publication has never attracted attention. Voltaire was a pugnacious writer who treated literary polemics as if they were a form of warfare – one of the volumes in which Boullier’s text was reprinted was entitled Guerre littéraire. The idea that he could have resisted replying to critics of Letter Twenty-Five should always have seemed puzzling. The fictional letter to ’s Gravesande was always intended for publication. It is, as César de Missy saw, a delightful revenge comedy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the 25th letter the best guide by far is Antony McKenna: Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Olivier Ferret and Antony McKenna (Paris: Garnier, 2010), 19–29, 35–60, 487–516. On the Lettre sur l’âme the best guide is Antony McKenna’s and Gianluca Mori’s introduction to OCV6C: OCV refers to Voltaire, The Complete Works of Voltaire = Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire. 205 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–2022). The question of whether the Lettre sur l’âme predates or postdates the Lettres philosophiques, and of its relationship to Letter Thirteen, is unsettled: I accept McKenna’s and Mori’s view that it predates the Lettres philosophiques and was replaced by Letter Thirteen (OCV6C:3–12). For an alternative view see Nicholas Cronk, OCV6A:137–139. I thank Antony McKenna for his comments on earlier drafts of this article.

2 For the additions, see OCV6B:539–57. Other references to Pascal may easily be identified by a search in Tout Voltaire: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/tout-voltaire.

3 Although Voltaire never acknowledged being the author of the Lettre sur l’âme it first appears in an edition of his works in 1764, and in 1772 in an edition published by Cramer, which amounts to a tacit acknowledgement.

4 Besterman’s definitive edition of Voltaire’s correspondence is volumes 85–135 (1968–1977) of OCV. This edition of the correspondence is also available on https://www.e-enlightenment.com/. Letters from the Besterman edition are conventionally cited by number, prefixed by D (for Definitive), in this case D2519. Besterman includes in the correspondence letters written by Voltaire to periodicals, but these, unlike the letter to ’s Gravesande, were not intended for republication and were never included in the Oeuvres during Voltaire’s lifetime.

5 David Wootton, ‘Voltaire on Liberty’, Journal des économistes et des études humaines 28 (2023): 59–90 addresses the classic study of Voltaire’s politics by Peter Gay (1959); David Wootton, ‘Voltaire: from Newtonianism to Spinozism’, History of European Ideas (2024): 1–22 addresses the classic study of Voltaire’s religion by René Pomeau (1956). It is a peculiar feature of the Voltaire scholarship that the key secondary literature dates to the 1950s.

6 Published in four tomes: OCV6A(1), 6A(2), 6B, 6C (2020–2022).

7 ‘Les Lettres philosophiques de Voltaire: archétype de l'impression clandestine’, forthcoming in Cahiers Voltaire 22 (2023).

8 OCV78A:23–53.

9 David Renaud Boullier, Lettres critiques sur les Lettres philosophiques de Mr. de Voltaire, par rapport à notre ame, à sa spiritualité & à son immortalité. Avec la défense des Pensées de Pascal contre la critique du même Mr de Voltaire (Paris: Duchesne, 1753).

10 OCV14:123.

11 For other versions see Voltaire, Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète (Amsterdam: Ledet, 1743), 106-112; Voltaire, Oeuvres 10 vols. (Dresden: Walther, 1748), 2:165-169; Voltaire, Oeuvres, ed. Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1880), Correspondance No. 1446.

12 The printing history of the Lettre sur l’âme is brilliantly handled in the introduction to Gianluca Mori’s and Antony McKenna’s edition, OCV6C.

13 The editions are listed in OCV6A(1):198, to which may be added the 1753 (St. Omer) edition of the Lettres critiques and the 1758 edition of Pascal’s Pensées.

14 Indeed it would have been helpful to print it as one of the Annexes which are to be found at the end of tome 6A(II). There are other lapses, such as the failure to discuss the reproduction of Voltaire’s letter on smallpox in La Mettrie, Traité de la petite vérole (1740), a work given an approbation by a careless censor; and the failure to discuss d’Argens’ Lettres philosophiques et critiques, par Mlle Co** (Cochois), avec les réponses de M. d'Arg** (d'Argens) (1744), in which d’Argens claims Voltaire’s translation of Hamlet’s soliloquy is better than the original. Mlle Cochois defends Cartesianism against Locke, Newton, and (implicitly) Voltaire. This deserves to be more widely known as a significant feminist text.

15 Because the letter to ’s-Gravesande had never been properly edited it is far from easy to list the occasions on which it was published. Besterman lists only two editions, apart from the Kehl and Moland editions: Mahomet (1743) and the Oeuvres (1748). Here is a listing of some other editions during Voltaire’s lifetime: (i) with Mahomet: Mahomet (1745), (1753), (1762 – Paris ed.), (1763); Oeuvres (1744); (ii) with Letter 25 of the Lettres philosophiques: Oeuvres (1748), (1764); (iii) with Elements de la philosophie de Neuton: Oeuvres (1752), (1772); (iv) in Miscellanies: Works (1762), (1780); Oeuvres (1757), (1770), (1771), (1772), (1775); Mélanges (1764), (1773); Oeuvres diverses (1746). As far as I can tell the letter to ’s-Gravesande was not printed as part of Voltaire’s correspondence before the Kehl edition, and it seems likely that it was included in every ‘complete’ edition of Voltaire’s works after 1743. It was significantly revised in 1748, presumably in part because this was the first time it had appeared alongside the expanded version of Letter 25, with which it overlapped.

16 Arnoux Straudo, Fortune de Pascal en France au dix-huitieme siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 102–4; unhelpfully, Straudo discusses this letter before his discussion of the work by Boullier (128–32) to which it replies.

17 For an earlier letter generally accepted to be a fictional letter written by Voltaire, although also accepted as genuine by many naive readers, see ‘Lettre de M. de Melon … sur l’Apologie du luxe’, published shortly after the death of both Melon and the addressee, the countess of Verrue: OCV16:310. Antony McKenna and Nicholas Cronk believe that D343, from Fawkener to Voltaire, which we know only because Voltaire quotes it in the Lettres philosophiques, is an invention: Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques ed. McKenna, 51; OCV6B:265n. In 1728 and/or 1733 Fawkener was not resident in a far-away country. I need hardly add that the Lettres philosophiques is itself a collection of fictional letters, and the preface to the English edition of 1733 deliberately misled the reader (at Voltaire’s instigation: D584, D635) by claiming that they had been written in England, were addressed to Thieriot, and were published in their order of composition – all of which was untrue.

18 One can thus hypothesise that it was Mme du Châtelet, not Voltaire, who purchased a copy of the third, expanded edition of W. J. ’s Gravesande, Physices elementa mathematica.

19 W. J. ’s Gravesande, Physices elementa mathematica, experiments confirmata, sive Introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam, ed. III, duplo auctior. 2 vols. (Leiden: Langerak, 1742), 2:714–25. The book was advertised as imminently forthcoming in the January to March 1742 issue of the Bibliothèque Raisonnée, 233. It was evidently ready for the press before ’s Gravesande died.

20 This passage was part of the text dropped in 1748.

21 Published by Pierre-Nicolas Desmolets in Continuation des Mémoires de littérature et d’histoire 5.ii (1728): 239–331.

22 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques ed. McKenna, 537. Why does Voltaire carefully, and exceptionally, date this addition? Partly to show that he is quoting a text which he had not read when he published the Lettres philosophiques; but perhaps also to imply that this revision to his text predates Boullier’s critique. It was the date given to this revision which presumably led the editors of the Kehl edition to assume that the letter to ’s Gravesande, which in its original version overlaps with it, must be of the same date, and indeed one might well suspect that the two are more or less contemporary, and both belong to 1742.

23 ‘Année’ is singular in the first edition and in the 1746 Ouevres diverses and the 1748 Oeuvres, but plural in the MS, in the édition encadrée of 1775 and in Kehl.

24 Lettres de M.B … . sur différents sujets de moral et de piété (Paris, 1737), 206–7.

25 See Voltaire to La Condamine, 22 June 1734 (D759); to Tournemine, c. June 1735 (D877).

26 Where on earth did Voltaire get the notion that human beings were supposed to have wings before the Fall? Or is he just being playful?

27 Voltaire insisted to Formont (22 September, 1735, D916) that Pope had gone further than he dared to go: ‘Savez vous que l'abbé du Resnel a traduit les Essais de Pope sur la nature humaine? Cela est bien pis que des réponses à Pascal. Le péché originel ne trouve pas son compte dans cet ouvrage. Je ne sais comment le du Resnel, qui cherche à faire sa fortune, se tirera de cette traduction. Hélas! très bien. Il n'y a qu'heur et malheur en ce monde. Il aura un bénéfice, et je serai brûlé.’ Despite the radicalism of the Essay on Man there were some twenty-one editions of the three French translations between 1736 and 1745. The only edition to be confiscated by the authorities was the Mélanges of 1742, presumably not for Pope’s Essay but Warburton’s Vindication.

28 Wootton, ‘Voltaire: from Newtonianism to Spinozism’, 8. For Voltaire’s later views, see his annotation to Pope’s Essay on Man where Pope writes “all the question.../ Is only this, if God has plac’d him [Man] wrong”, and Voltaire responds “no. but why he made him so miserable” and, later, “peut on donc ne pas gemir detre en proye a tant de maux?” (OCV142:133-34). Voltaire writes alongside Pope’s line “Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less?” “jay dit cela il y a quarante ans”. Cronk suggests this was written in 1756 (OCV6B:532n), but it must have been written in the 1770s: see George R. Havens “Voltaire's marginal comments upon Pope's Essay on Man”, Modern Language Notes 43 (1928): 429-439 (which does not argue, as claimed at OCV142:435, that the annotations date to the Cirey period). It would seem likely that the annotations are a prelude to his final remarks on Pascal, published in 1778.

29 See Letter 25, remarks VII, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVII. (I owe this point to Antony McKenna.)

30 On Fourmont see Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, ‘Etienne Fourmont, Philosophe in Disguise’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 102 (1973): 65–119, which seems to me to somewhat understate the extent to which Fourmont should be read as deliberately attacking Christianity. I am grateful to Antony McKenna for discussing this with me. He was, of course, already familiar with the version of this trick performed by Swift in a Tale of a Tub (OCV81:65): see his discussion of that book in 1756: OCV6B:518–19.

31 The text of Pascal’s Pensées known in the eighteenth century was very different from that printed in modern editions: Mara Vamos, ‘Pascal’s Pensées and the Enlightenment: The Roots of a Misunderstanding’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 97 (1972): 7–145; on the wager, 43, 71, 85–86. Voltaire accurately (by eighteenth-century standards) quotes Pascal and does not misrepresent his views as they were known at the time: Jerolyn Scull, ‘Voltaire’s Reading of Pascal: His Quotations Compared to Early Texts’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 161 (1976): 19–41.

32 Besterman’s notes need to be supplemented by those of the Moland edition (1880). Moland records this passage, but not that it is new in 1748.

33 OCV80A:69.

34 For Voltaire’s own brief history of French Jansenism, see OCV80A:67–68, the ‘Avertissement’ to the Éloges et Pensées de Pascal. He evidently dated the demise of Jansenism as a significant force to 1731 (the year in which de Maisons died).

35 We can’t tell exactly how many parts Voltaire received. The first part was advertised in February, the second in March, the third in May of 1733: Robert Shackleton, ‘Pope’s Essay on Man and the French Enlightenment’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century II, ed. R.F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 1–15, at 4. Since the Essay was dedicated to Bolingbroke (initially under the pseudonym of Laelius) it would seem likely that he was sent copies by Pope, which he will have distributed amongst his friends, including Voltaire. Perhaps it was Bolingbroke who, in an effort to protect Pope’s anonymity, spread the strange notion that the long-deceased Wollaston might be the author (D631). My argument depends on assuming Voltaire could have had copies of the first two parts.

36 Lanson was of the same view: Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson and André M Rousseau. 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1964), 2:146.

37 Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance, littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc. 16 vols. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1877), 8:248.

38 René Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire. Nouvelle édition revue et mise à jour (Paris: Nizet, 1969), 131n.

39 Dryden presumably appears on the list because he remained free to publish although sympathetic to Jacobitism – a comparable French author would have been driven into exile.

40 Our evidence as to when Voltaire began work on Letter Twenty-Five consists of an insecurely dated letter (D617) attributed by Besterman to 1 June; but Letter Twenty-Five is long, and surely took him some weeks to write.

41 Shackleton, ‘Pope’s Essay on Man and the French Enlightenment’; Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques ed. McKenna, 37–45.

42 I cite the first editions of I and II: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man. Address'd to a Friend. Part I. [London}, Printed for J. Wilford, [1733]; Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man. In Epistles to a Friend. Epistle II. [London}, Printed for J. Wilford, [1733].

43 ‘Pope, maître de Voltaire’: Joseph Robert A. Duhamel, Lettres flamandes, ou Histoire des variations & contradictions de la prétendue religion naturelle (Lille: Danel, 1753), 72.

44 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished. 7 vols. ([London]: Chapman and Hall Ltd, 1893), 171.

Appendix: Voltaire’s reading of Pope’s Essay on Man

If we accept Besterman’s dating, Voltaire first envisaged writing Letter Twenty-Five of the Lettres philosophiques a few days after receiving the first two parts of Pope’s Essay on Man (D609; D617).³⁵ Robert Shackleton and Antony McKenna have consequently argued that Pope’s Essay was a crucial influence on Letter Twenty-Five. Despite this, and the evident conceptual similarity between the two works, Cronk claims (OCV6B: 220n, 530n, 532n, 539, 541–542n) that Voltaire wrote Letter Twenty-Five before he read Pope (D631, D635).³⁶

Shackleton and McKenna partly rely on the date of c. 10 May 1733 attributed by Besterman to D609, a letter to the Abbé du Resnel, promising to forward his own copy of the Essay to him – Resnel had already translated Pope’s Essay on Criticism into French verse and would later translate the Essay on Man, also into verse (apparently with Voltaire’s collaboration, for Voltaire would later claim that he had written half of du Resnel’s verses [D15481], and Grimm would claim that it was on the Essay on Man that they had collaborated).³⁷ But it would seem (to me at least) that when in his letter to du Resnel Voltaire states that he is sending him a copy of the Temple du goût he must mean the edition published in Amsterdam. The evidence is that Voltaire received copies of that edition sometime between 9 and 24 July (D628, D635). Apart from letter D609, his first reference to Pope’s Essay is in a letter of 14 July (D631), and it would thus seem probable (as Pomeau has argued) that D609 dates to mid-July.³⁸ Voltaire had sent the twenty-fifth Letter to Jore on or just before 1 July (D626). Thus the letter to du Resnel should be put to one side, as it was likely written after Voltaire had finished writing Letter Twenty-Five.

There is however other evidence which seems to have been overlooked. In Voltaire’s ‘Lettre à un premier commis’, dated 20 June 1733, though only published in 1746, Voltaire wrote ‘Si Milton, Dryden, Pope, et Locke n’avaient pas été libres, l’Angleterre n’aurait eu ni des poètes ni des philosophes' (OCV9:319). Surely when Voltaire wrote this he had the Essay on Man in mind, for he is unlikely to be thinking of the Dunciad, which would qualify as one of the defamatory pamphlets which Voltaire thinks should be severely repressed, and what else had Pope written which would have fallen foul of the censors had he been French?³⁹ Moreover Pope’s name does not look like an afterthought: without it the list contains two dangerous Protestants, Milton and Locke; Pope, a nominal Catholic, both a poet and a philosopher, is present in the list as Voltaire’s alter ego; without him the list would only contain one philosopher, and no Catholic. It would not serve its purpose. On 20 June Voltaire had not yet sent the text of Letter Twenty-Five to Jore (D626), but Pope already (if we accept the date of the ‘Lettre à un premier commis’ as genuine, as Cronk does (OCV6A:121)) seemed to him a major representative of English cultural liberty.

So there are grounds for thinking that Voltaire had a copy of one or more parts of the Essay on Man in his hands before 20 June, while he was working on Letter Twenty-Five.⁴⁰ The question of whether Voltaire had read Pope’s Essay on Man before Letter Twenty-Five had taken shape remains open. Still, one would not want to rely too heavily on the date of the ‘Lettre à un premier commis’, given Voltaire’s willingness to fabricate his own correspondence.

There can be no doubt, however, regarding the close correspondence between the first two parts of Pope’s Essay and Voltaire’s Letter Twenty-Five. Later Voltaire would describe Pope’s Essay as a ‘paraphrase’ (D915; also D916, D942, D1065) of his own Letter Twenty-Five, and, citing a passage he had added in 1739 (OCV6B:541), and which was surely influenced by Pope, remark on the happy coincidence that their views overlapped, while being independent of each other (OCV6B:531–532); this last was surely either a deliberate misdirection or a peculiar memory lapse.

In the absence of decisive evidence as to the date at which Voltaire read the first two parts of the Essay on Man we have to turn to the text to see if we can find evidence of Pope’s influence. I (following in the footsteps of Shackleton and McKenna) think it is evident that Voltaire had Pope’s Essay to hand.⁴¹ These are the key passages:⁴²

1. two remarks which deal with self-love. Compare 25:III lines 78–86 (in OCV6B) and the whole of XI to the following lines in Pope’s Essay part II: lines 43 (‘Two Principles in Human Nature reign;’) to 160 (‘Hope travels thro’, nor quits us when we die.') Pope, and Voltaire following him, make two crucial moves here: (a) they locate self-love and the passions in the body rather than treating them as mere vices; and (b) they insist that self-love gives rise to genuine virtue, which is precisely to reject the Mandevillian argument that all apparent virtues are fraudulent. Thus Pope showed Voltaire how he could escape from the pseudo-Calvinist tradition of Bayle and Mandeville, and the Jansenist tradition of Nicole and Pascal, and treat self-love as the basis of an authentic virtue.

2. Man is in his right place in nature. Compare Essay I, lines 43 (‘Presumptuous Man! The reason woudst thou find,’) to 50 (‘Why Jove’s satellites are less than Jove?') with 25:III, lines 90–93.

3. Both reject Stoic indifference and self-contemplation and insist that man is born to act: compare Pope, Essay, II, lines 91 (‘In lazy apathy lets Stoics boast’) to 100 (‘He mounts the storm, and walks upon the Wind.’) with 25:XXIII, lines 449–454. Thus they reject the long philosophical tradition which prioritises contemplation over action.

4. Both emphasise hope. Compare Essay I, lines 85 (‘Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;’) to 94 (‘Rests, and expatiates, in a life to come.’) with 25:XXII, lines 416–420.

5. Both reject philosophical criticisms of divine providence as rooted in pride: compare Essay I lines 119 (‘Go, wiser Thou! and in thy scale of sence’) to 127 (‘In Pride (my Friend) in Pride, our error lies;’) with 25:XXVIII, lines 522–524.

In my judgement, then, Voltaire had read Pope before he wrote Letter Twenty-Five, which reflects Pope’s influence.⁴³ Why then add two further remarks in 1739, one of which directly echoes Pope (OCV6B:541–542)? The answer, I suggest, is that Voltaire had been emboldened by the approbation given to du Resnel’s translation to make what he took to be Pope’s central claim, that ‘la nature de l’homme à toujours été et toujours dû être ce qu’elle est’ (D915).

In trying to decide whether Voltaire’s views simply happen to coincide with Pope’s (as Johnson’s Rasselas happens to coincide in so many respects with Voltaire’s Candide) or were rather influenced by Pope, we should bear in mind what Voltaire had to say in a 1756 addition to the Lettres philosophiques:

Ainsi presque tout est imitation. L’idée des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l’Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imité le Pulci; l’Arioste a imité le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres … . Plusieurs auteurs anglais nous ont copiés, et n’en ont rien dit. Il en est des livres comme du feu dans nos foyers; on va prendre ce feu chez son voisin, on l’allume chez soi, on le communique à d’autres, et il appartient à tous. (OCV6B:520–521)

But I will leave (almost) the last word to Thomas Carlyle:

No one, we suppose, ever arrogated for Voltaire any praise of originality in this discussion [of Christianity]; we suppose there is not a single idea, of any moment, relating to the Christian Religion, in all his multifarious writings, that had not been set forth again and again before his enterprises commenced.⁴⁴

Carlyle, I think, is right about Voltaire, but implicitly wrong to fail to notice Pope’s originality, for the treatment of self-love we find in Voltaire had not been set forth again and again. It was new; it was (as Voltaire later insisted: D1039) perhaps implicit in Shaftesbury, but it was Pope who had grasped its full force, and Voltaire followed his lead.