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CHAPTER IX A Case Study in Incompatibility: The Philosophe Voltaire and the Calvinist La Beaumelle, 1750-1756 During the six-year period beginning in July 1750 when he arrived at the court of Frederick of Prussia, Voltaire came to grips with the realities of the French Calvinist experience for the first time. To begin with, he met scholarly Calvinist pastors such as Samuel Formey and Charles Louis de Beausobre, descendants of Huguenot refugees who had been welcomed to Berlin following the Revocation. However implausibly, Voltaire treated these and other Protestant theologians as potential converts to his own deist creed, as he made clear in two short works read or published while he was in Berlin—the Sermon des cinquante and the Defense de milord Bolingbroke. The main preoccupation of the philosophe during the early part of his Berlin stay was the completion and publication of Le Siicle de Louis XTV, the fruit of some twenty years of meditation and research. Two of the central theses of this work—the contention that the civilizing achievement of the Sun King far outweighed the damage done to French society by his arbitrariness, and the argument that the record of French Calvinism had been both subversive and fanatical—provoked strong reaction in Huguenot circles. Voltaire's views were in fact almost immediately challenged by the Calvinist pamphleteer Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle who turned up in Berlin soon after Voltaire's arrival hoping to find in the celebrated playwright a patron and protector. The two men had a falling out, however, and, to spite Voltaire, La Beaumelle publicly challenged the version of French Protestant history set forth in Le Siicle. For the next four years, the pamphleteer and the playwright engaged in a bitter polemical exchange in the course of which the Protestant brought off something of a literary coup by publishing fifteen volumes of memoirs and correspondence centred around the career of the 'new Catholic' Madame de Maintenon. Voltaire's decision to settle in Berlin in the summer of 1750 was a natural one. Fourteen years earlier, Frederick, then Crown Prince of Prussia, had written to applaud the attack on religious zeal made in Alzire and the two men had subsequently been in close correspondence, each exhorting the other to greater effort in the battle against superstition and intolerance.1 The knowledge that the philosophe was preparing a major work on the age of Louis XIV was, of course, also bound to excite the curiosity of the local French Calvinist community. To Pastor Formey, who had indicated such an interest, Voltaire forwarded several chapters of his forthcoming text in manuscript form. Years later, the cleric noted in his 119 120 The Huguenots and French Opinion: 1685-1787 memoirs that he had been disturbed at the lack of religious and patriotic conviction which he found in the 'philosophic' history of Voltaire.2 The relationship between Voltaire and Pastor Beausobre developed even less auspiciously. In the spring of 1751, several months before the appearance of Le Siicle de Louis XFV, Beausobre had published Le Triomphe de {'Innocence in which the Sun King was presented as a monarch of "boundless ambition" and "mindless zeal" who had been seduced by the Catholic clergy into abolishing the rights of his faithful Calvinist subjects. The plague and famine which had descended upon France in 1709 were proof enough of Heaven's wrath at the King's depravity, the pastor argued.3 Voltaire relayed his contempt for this tract in verse form to Frederick: Je renvoye au heros dont je suis enchant6 Cet empoul6 fatras d'un ministre entet6 Triomphe du faux gout plus que l'innocence.4 Yet, for all their weaknesses, Voltaire was convinced that scholarly Protestant clergymen such as Formey and Beausobre were not an altogether hopeless band. In two short works conceived during his Berlin period, Voltaire urged contemporary Protestant theologians to join him in completing the spiritual liberation which had been begun during the Reformation by moving towards deism or at least by suspending their attacks on the champions of natural religion. The Defense de milord Bolinbroke, published anonymously in November 1752, was a reply to an article in the Nouvelle Bibliotheque germanique in which Formey had taken to task a number of prominent figures, including Frederick, for espousing Bolingbroke's deist creed. Pretending to speak as a moderate Protestant, Voltaire asked why deists should be treated more harshly than papists, especially when they were not idolaters and when they freely declared themselves to be...

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