CHAPTER TWO

“TO ENCOURAGE THE OTHERS”: THE PHILOSOPHES AND THE WAR

Armstrong Starkey

While they were talking, the ship reached Portsmouth. The waterside was crowded with a host of people who were gazing intently at a stout man kneeling, with his eyes bandaged, on the deck of a man of war. Four sol­ diers stood opposite him and fired three rounds each into his skull with the utmost composure, at which the crowd dispersed evidently quite satisfied. ‘What can this all be about?’ cried Candide, ‘and what devil is it that rules the roast here and everywhere?’ He asked who the stout man was who had just been so ceremoniously disposed of. ‘He was an admiral,’ they told him. ‘But why execute this admiral?’ he enquired. ‘Because he did not have enough dead men to his credit’ was the reply; ‘he joined battle with a French admiral, and it has been established that their ships were not close enough to engage.’ ‘But surely, exclaimed Candide, ‘the French admiral must have been just as far from the English as the English admiral was from the French!’ ‘True enough,’ was the answer; but in this country we find it pays to shoot an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.’1 Such was the ironic comment of the Enlightenment’s central figure, in his most famous book, on the execution of British Vice Admiral John Byng on March 14, 1757. As one of Voltaire’s biographers has observed, “pour encour­ ager les autres” was to become “one of the very few phrases from French literature to have gained a proverbial currency in the English language.”2 Candide is often seen as representing a major turning point in Voltaire’s thought and career in which he broke with the early Enlightenment’s con­ cept of a benign and orderly universe so eloquently argued in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 resulting in the death

1 Voltaire, Candide, trans. John Butt (London: Penguin, 1947), 110–11. 2 Haydn Mason, Voltaire: A Biography (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1981), 83. 24 armstrong starkey of 100,000 innocent people suggested that the universe was neither orderly nor benign. The Seven Years’ War, the most violent and disastrous conflict of the old regime appeared to reveal the dark and brutal elements of human nature almost untouched by the soft, civilizing hand of the Enlightenment. However, Voltaire had been scarcely unaware of the evils unleashed on humanity by war. It would be better to say that the Seven Years’ War only intensified his revulsion. Thus when Candide’s companion Martin observes that Britain and France “are fighting over a few acres of snow on the borders of Canada, And that they spend more money on this glorious war than the whole of Canada is worth”, he echoes Voltaire’s bleak letter to Frederick II about the “History of the War of 1741” (a part of the conflict generally known as the War of the Austrian Succession): I have attempted to consider that human folly somewhat as a philosopher. I have portrayed Spain and England spending a hundred million waging war against each other over a matter of ninety-five thousand pounds; nations destroying the commerce over which they fight one another; war over the pragmatic sanction which has become like a sickness changing character three or four times, from a fever becoming a paralysis, and from a paralysis becoming a convulsion…a chaos of diverse interests at every moment; that which was true in the spring becoming false in the autumn; everyone crying out peace, peace, and waging all-out war; finally, all the scourges that prey upon the poor human race….3 Voltaire was an active participant in the Byng episode. In 1756 the unfortu­ nate admiral had led a British squadron to the relief of Britain’s key Mediterranean naval base at Port Mahon on the island Minorca, whose garrison found itself besieged by a French expeditionary force com­ manded by Voltaire’s close friend the Duke of Richelieu. The British were protected by strong fortifications and the French lacked supplies for a pro­ longed siege. Byng’s intervention therefore could have proved decisive, but, after fighting an inconclusive action in which not all of his ships were engaged, he withdrew to Gibraltar, leaving the garrison to its fate. Britain began the Seven Years’ War in Europe with a stunning defeat and the navy with humiliation. Public opinion was outraged and Byng’s fellow officers almost unanimously condemned his performance. Byng, believing that his conduct was beyond reproach, seems to have been surprised by the outcry. A new ministry, formed as a consequence of the fall of Minorca,

3 Candide, 110; Voltaire to Frederick II, King of Prussia, February 9, 1747, in The Selected Letters of Voltaire, ed. and trans. Richard A. Brock (New York: New York University Press, 1973), 123–24.