Really Voltaire?

The benefit of a translation is that it can disclose the banality of its original without the disguise of fine prose giving it a specious significance. I’ve been reading Voltaire’s Letters on the English (Lettres Philosophique). My first thought was ‘this is just persiflage, there is no attempt to go into any depth on his topics’. Higher journalism even when you’re the first to have done it does not make it worth ever having been done. His articles on religion are a clear nod to his constituency to allow them to feel superior to unenlightened believers.

About this time arose the illustrious William Penn, who established the power of the Quakers in America, and would have made them appear venerable in the eyes of the Europeans, were it possible for mankind to respect virtue when revealed in a ridiculous light.

(from Letters no 4)

So much for the Quakers, wigless babblers. Reading the French wiki on the book I noted a strange omission. The burning of the book by the Royal hangman and the controversy raised by its article on Locke made Voltaire that most delicious of criminals, the intellectual outlaw. No mention of that nor the materialist tendency of his letter on Mr. Locke. French wiki offers the blindingly obvious:

Cet ouvrage est destiné à un peuple plus ou moins cultivé, capable de lire mais nécessitant une certaine éducation poussée, par la façon dont il est écrit. Il s'agit d'une suite de lettres, et donc de destinataires.

In fact the whole tendency of the letters was an invitation to indulge in invidious comparison or to take a rise out of the French. The matter of English food is passed over.

Voltaire has a breezy way with history. He summarizes the history of Europe from the time of Louis the Feeble till the reign of Charles V in England:

The field and the scaffold ran with blood on account of theological arguments, sometimes in one century, sometimes in another, for almost five hundred years, without interruption; and the long continuance of this dreadful scourge was owing to the fact that morality was always neglected to indulge a spirit of dogmatizing.

(from Essays on the Manners and Spirit of Nations)

To think that transubstantiation could cause so much conflict. Pick your enemies carefully from amongst those despised by right thinking people and your observations about them will not be scrutinised too carefully.

B:It was forbidden to marry one’s sister in Rome. It was allowed among the Egyptians, the Athenians and even among the Jews, to marry one’s sister on the father’s side. It is with regret that I cite that wretched little Jewish people; who should certainly not serve as a model for anyone, and who (putting religion aside) were never anything but a race of ignorant and fanatic brigands. But still, according to their books, the young Tamar, before being ravished by her brother Amnon, says to him: “Nay, my brother, do not thou this folly, but speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.”

A: All that is conventional law, arbitrary customs, passing fashions; the essential remains always.

(from Natural Law in Philosophical Dictionary)

Proleptically speaking, he would say that when we know that his last mistress, Madame Denis. was the daughter of his sister.