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C H A P T E R IV An Abstract Combat: Voltaire's First Battles Against Intolerance, 1713-1750 The reconstruction of French Calvinism which began in earnest during the Regency period coincided with the advent of a generation of writers intent upon subjecting the inheritance of Louis XIV to an exhaustive critique. One of the major items in the lengthy indictment which they subsequently produced was, predictably, a condemnation of the dead monarch's repressive and counter-productive religious policy. Yet while these intellectuals were unanimous in deploring the wave of intolerance and fanaticism which had swept over France in the last decades of the seventeenth century, they were not always free of the anti-Calvinist prejudice which had helped to furnish Louis XIV with a rationale for the Revocation. The most notorious, and no doubt the most brilliant, of this new generation of writers, Voltaire, is rightly celebrated for having made a more articulate, persistent, and effective effort in behalf of religious toleration than any of his intellectual contemporaries.1 It has been suggested that his motives in battling intolerance were less than pure, that he intervened in the Galas case, for instance, chiefly out of a yearning for self-advertisement or from a perverse desire to bring organized Christianity of all kinds into disrepute;2 but the real interest which he showed in the Huguenot condition, beginning in the 1760s, undoubtedly helped persuade a generation of Frenchmen to demand an end to the persecution of Calvinists. Whatever the significance of this later involvement, Voltaire showed only an oblique interest in the situation of his Protestant fellow countrymen between his literary debut and the decision which he made in the spring of 1762 to defend the memory of Calas. A number of factors help explain this relative indifference. To begin with, except for a brief liaison with the young Calvinist refugee, Olympe Du Noyer, while he was secretary to the French ambassador at The Hague in 1713,3 Voltaire knew very little about the Huguenot community living inside France. Lacking this awareness, the philosophe perceived French Calvinist society mainly through the scholarly sources, many of them biased against the Huguenots, which he consulted while writing works such as La Henriade. Both his political and his philosophical convictions strongly influenced Voltaire's attitude towards the Calvinists. As a supporter of the thise royale,4 he could never forget or forgive the Camisard rebels who had challenged the authority of that most civilizing of monarchs, Louis XIV. His deism5 made Voltaire feel as spiritually distant from orthodox Calvinists as 49 50 The Huguenots and FrenchOpinion: 1685-1787 he did from conventional Catholics, except for those moments when he sensed an inclination towards natural religion among the more radical pastors. He associated dogmatic religion of all kinds with rabies theologica, the carrier of superstition and intolerance. The toleration which he advocated was designed as a palliative to arrest this religious rage rather than as a device by which men of deep conviction would come to respect the spiritual integrity of those holding opposing views. Although he knew little of the Huguenot condition and although he was in many ways predisposed against French Calvinism, Voltaire wrote a number of works during the first part of his career whichdirectly served the cause of toleration. These include not only La Henriade (1723) and the Lettres philosophiques (1733) but a number of lesser works, some of them not intended for publication and, therefore, all the more likely to relay his true feelings. Voltaire's views about French Calvinism as well as about toleration were given their first public expression in La Henriade.^ In the course of researching the historical context for this poem, Voltaire consulted the standard sixteenth-centurychroniclers, most of whom blamed the outbreak of the French religious wars of the sixteenth century on the Huguenots.7 In the end, however, the single most important source for the underlyingtheme of La Henriade was neither a Catholic nor a Calvinist apologist, but Frangois de Mezeray, one of the Politiques who had urged the monarchyto restore its authority by detaching itself from both Catholic and Protestant sectarianism. 8 For Mezeray as for Voltaire, the conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism, like the concession of toleration to the Huguenots which followed it, was designed above all to consolidate monarchical authority.By his magnanimity in victory to partisans of both factions, by his opportune conversion to the faith of the majority, the founder of the Bourbon dynasty is...

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