And if Voltaire Ceased to be Voltaire? The Influence of Fénelon’s Quietism on Voltaire’s Later Works Karen Pagani

This paper interrogates Voltaire’s evolving estimation of Fénelon’s Quietism and the degree to which the latter’s theology may have influenced Voltaire’s late Theism. It thus examines what could be construed as an about-face in Voltaire’s moral theory. It suggests that Voltaire ultimately assumed an auto-critical stance toward the views on religion and morality expressed in those works for which he is best known, such as Candide and Le dictionnaire philosophique. Through an examination of Voltaire’s correspondence alongside his later theological works, this paper demonstrates that Voltaire’s doctrine of Theism, was largely informed by Fénelon’s interpretations of pure love, Jesus Christ and grace.

I. Introduction At least since the publication of Albert Cherel’s study, Fénelon au XVIIIe siècle en France (1715–1820) in 1917, the posthumous influence of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon’s theology has – for good reason – consistently attracted the attention of scholars in various fields and disciplines. Indeed, after the Bible, Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699) was the most widely read literary work in eighteenth-century France.1 It is thus hard to understate Fénelon’s influence on writers who sought to combat the hyper-rationalist thrust of the High Enlightenment with a softer variety of morality that extolled sentiment and left room for religious faith. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, for example, repeatedly bestows a most unequivocal variety of praise upon Fénelon in his Études de la nature (1784), referring to the ill-fated Fénelon as the “divin Fénelon.”2 “Et vous,” he writes, “qui avez donné à la fois la precept et l’exemple de la vertu, divin auteur du Télémaque ! Nous révérions vos cendres et votre image.”3 In Rousseau’s Emile (1762), Sophie’s love of virtue and her fantasies of domestic bliss are honed by her careful (some may say, obsessive) reading of Télémaque. In De l’Allemagne (1810), Madame de Staël constantly refers to Fénelon’s account of pure love in her explication of Kant’s moral theory,

1 Patrick Riley, ‘Introduction’, in Fenelon, Telemachus, son of Ulysses, ed. by idem. (Cam- bridge 1994), p. vi. See also Jacques Le Brun’s ‘Avant-Propos’ to Fénelon : mystique et politique (1699–1999). Actes du colloque international de Strasbourg pour le troisième centenaire de la publication du ‘Télémaque’ et de la ‘Condamnation des maximes des saints’, ed. by François-Xavier Cuche (Paris 1999), p. 9. 2 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Etudes de la nature, ed. by Colas Duflo (Saint-Etienne 2007), p. 262. 3 “And you, heavenly author of Télémaque, who simultaneously have given us both a precept and an example of virtue. We shall see your ashes and your image once again.”, ibid., p. 541. 26 Karen Pagani highlighting how both thinkers had boldly insisted that moral actions must be utterly void of any vested interest on the agent’s part.4 Inspired – perhaps a little too heavily – by Fénelon, Staël had gravely misread or at least misrepresented Kant on account of her desire to turn back the clock and render Fénelon’s theology relevant to moral theory once again, or so the story goes.5 Yet, the possibility that Fénelon may have influenced more rank-and-file French Enlightenment thinkers is rarely (if ever) entertained in any sustained manner. In the history of ideas, Fénelon’s thought, or so it seems, appealed principally to those eighteenth-century thinkers who themselves never could quite digest the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment and who stood out in their day as tears in the fabric of time. Here, however, we will examine what appears to have been Fénelon’s influence on a man who could in all fairness be described as the French Enlightenment’s poster-child: Voltaire. Essentially, what interests me is what could arguably be construed as an about-face in Voltaire’s moral theory toward the end of his career. Although they are often overlooked or, at times, dismissed as pandering to religious authorities, Voltaire’s final theological works betray what can best be described as an auto-critical stance toward the views on religion and morality expressed in those works for which he is best known, such as Candide (1759) and Le dictionnaire philosophique (1764). An examination of his correspondence alongside his later theological works, such as Tout en Dieu : Commentaire sur Malebranche (1769) and Il faut prendre un parti (1772), reveals that Voltaire’s doctrine of Theism, a doctrine that he would only develop toward the end of his life, may have in fact been largley informed by Fénelon’s interpretations of pure love, Jesus Christ and grace.

4 Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, De l’Allemagne, ed. by Pauline de Pange, 5 vols. (Paris 1958–1960). Her praise for these thinkers as providing the necessary counter-balance to the materialist philosophy of French Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, Diderot and Helvétius, is re-iterated throughout the text. See in par- ticular IV, pp. 61–63, pp. 69–71 and V, pp. 96–98, p. 106. 5 In The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘De l’Allemagne’ (Cambridge 1994), John Claiborne Isbell has convincingly demonstrated that Staël’s desire to exploit what she most likely observed to be the miraculous proximity be- tween Fénelon’s mysticism and Kant’s philosophy led to some serious (and not en- tirely unwitting) slippage on her part with regard to both Kant’s account of practical reason and the role of sentiment in the latter’s understanding of religion (see in par- ticular ibid., p. 169). I do, however, have serious reservations about the widely ac- cepted belief that de Staël had misunderstood Kant. On this point, see my article en- titled ‘Judging Oswald within the Limits of Reason Alone in Madame de Staël’s Corinne’, The European Romantic Review, 23.2 (2012), 141–156.