Among the western philosophers, the most fervent admirer of China is unquestionably Voltaire. If he spent his life pursuing its old masters with his sarcasm, he also knows how to read them attentively and draw from their works the confirmation of his own ideas.
As early as 1734, traces of these readings can be detected in the eleventh of the Philosophical Letters which contains a eulogy of Chinese-style inoculation, inspired by Father d’Entrecolles. But it is in the historical works that Voltaire’s debt to missionary literature clearly appears. One can say without exaggerating that he took his conception of a History freed from the narrow limits assigned to it, in time and space, by his predecessors, in particular the French theologist Bossuet. By discovering in Letters the existence of a China that was both very distant and very ancient, Voltaire laid the foundations of his Universal History, the Essay on Morals. The Peking Fathers, notably Parennin, indeed spoke at great length about Chinese chronology, the origins of which are lost in the mists of time and of which each stage is authenticated by written annals and precise astronomical observations.
Faced with this fabulous and so long antiquity, the history of the Judeo-Christian world seems derisory !
This discovery was, for more than a century, to fuel a theological debate of the utmost importance since the proven antiquity of China called into question the accuracy of the biblical chronology, thus casting doubts on the value of the Scriptures. We understand, under these conditions, the enthusiasm of Voltaire who, with one stone, killed two birds: Chinese chronology was part of his historical system and at the same time China begins to be a weapon against the Bible.
He said China made start the History of the world, with it also the development of civilization, sciences and arts.
Chinese superiority breaks out in all areas: political, economic, religious, cultural. “What puts the Chinese above all the peoples of the earth », he writes in the article History of the Encyclopedia, « is that neither their laws nor their mores nor the language that the letters speak among them have changed for about four thousand years. China invented almost all the arts before we had learned any of them”.
What a eulogy !
China and French «Enlightenment »
Now it is in Jesuit literature that Voltaire found the picture of the ideal government, a kind of constitutional monarchy where the Emperor governs by relying on the great bodies of the State. “The human mind can certainly not imagine a government better than one where everything is decided by great tribunals subordinate to each other, whose members are received only after several severe examinations. […] It is impossible for the Emperor to exercise arbitrary power in such an administration »
And it is from the letters of Father Constancin that Voltaire took example of Emperor Yong Zheng to image a kind of « enlightened despotism » which he wishes to see in Europe.
The flattering portrait of this Emperor “friend of the Laws and the Public good” takes place in the last chapter of the Century of Louis XIV, no doubt to balance the faults of the French monarch with his perfections. Yong Zheng practices enlightened justice and above all a far-sighted economic policy, which makes it possible to fight famine: a wise lesson for a Europe periodically threatened by this scourge.
The Edifying Letters also told how, once a year, in the spring, the Emperor, to attract the favors of Heaven on future harvests, himself held the handles of a plow and traced the first furrow. This image of Epinal was to enjoy extraordinary success in France. Popularized by prints, taken up by all those who, directly or indirectly, were interested in agriculture, it had everything to seduce the physiocrats. Convinced that the first source of wealth is the land, they believed that they had found in China the agricultural State of which they dreamed, and Quesnay, the author of « Despotisme de la Chine », the one who had been nicknamed the “Confucius of the Europe”, advised Louis XV in 1756 to imitate the Chinese emperor by celebrating spring plowing like him !
Tolerance yes, « but not for intolerance » !
But the master quality of Yong Zheng remains in the eyes of Voltaire tolerance.
Unexpected praise from an emperor who, precisely, persecuted the Christian religion and expelled the missionaries! Praise all the more surprising that it emanates from the victims themselves ?
It is, in fact, from the correspondence of Father Contancin that Voltaire drew Yong-Zheng’s speech which he never tires of rewriting so much he finds it to his liking, and which is contained in this formula: “I am tolerant and I drive you away because you are intolerant ” !
The quarrels of the missionaries, their greed, their ambition, their ideological imperialism are indeed dangerous for the state and require severe measures. This indictment was a godsend for Voltaire. By reporting the harangue of their persecutor, the missionaries had no idea that they were going to provide the adversary with formidable arguments.
Voltaire’s interest in the “Letters entitled Edifying” (this is his expression) is further explained by a community of views with the Jesuits who ranked the Chinese in two classes: on the one hand, the mass of the people , given over to fanaticism and supertitious practices; on the other, an aristocracy of scholars whose purified religion placed itself under the patronage of Confucius. Voltaire readily adopts the elitist conception of the missionaries who fought against popular beliefs and the influence of the monks but exalted, on the other hand, the deism of the mandarins.
Voltaire adapted a Chinese play
China is omnipresent in the work of Voltaire. In a tale like « The Princess of Babylon », the heroine on arriving in Cambalu (Beijing) discovers the density of the population, the politeness of the mandarins, the luxury, the taste for the arts, the emperor-plowman, his justice, his wisdom, etc.
For the theatre, Voltaire adapted a Chinese play which he knew from a translation by P. de Prémare and which he had the audacity to have performed in oriental costumes: it was the masterpiece « L’Orphelin de la Chine ».
