Photo: Portrait of Voltaire by Nicolas de Largillière, c1720
Zounds: Simon Webb on Voltaire and the Quakers
‘Of his twenty-five letters, no fewer than four are on the subject of Friends.’
Can it really be 300 years since Voltaire began his exile in England, and first encountered Quakers? The celebrated French writer had been beaten up on the orders of one of his enemies, and locked up in the Bastille. Not wishing that to happen again, he came to live in England. This was in 1726, the same year Gulliver’s Travels was published. Voltaire’s Letters on England has some of the surreal quality of Swift’s satirical masterpiece.
Chief among the oddities of England that Voltaire felt worth writing home about were the Quakers. Of his twenty-five letters, no fewer than four are on the subject of Friends. To put this into context, there is just one on Anglicanism; only Isaac Newton attracted anything like the attention the future author of Candide dedicated to Quakers.
In the first of his letters, Voltaire claimed to have learned the Quaker fundamentals from a Friend living near London. This Friend, whom we now know to have been one Andrew Pitt, was ‘a hale, ruddy-complexioned old man’ with a ‘more noble [and] a more engaging aspect’ than anyone his visitor had ever met. Finding Voltaire to be unusually curious, Pitt set out the nature of Quakerism for his visitor.
Posing, perhaps for the sake of humour, as someone who was familiar with no religious ideas beyond Roman Catholicism, Voltaire affected to be shocked, especially by all the things the Quakers did not do. Hearing that neither Pitt nor any of his ‘brethren’ had been baptised, Voltaire responded with, ‘Zounds… you are not Christians, then’. Begging his visitor not to swear (not for the last time), Voltaire’s host went on to explain not just Friends’ objection to water-baptism, but also their plain dress, speech and general behaviour. Pitt also recommended that Voltaire read Robert Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity.
Voltaire followed Pitt’s advice, and obtained a copy. He included an account of it in one letter, which concentrated on Barclay’s dedication of his piece to Charles II. Evidently, Voltaire thought Barclay had a great deal of cheek, advising the king to ‘apply thyself to that light of Christ which shineth in thy conscience, which neither can nor will flatter thee nor suffer thee to be at ease in thy sins’.
Voltaire encountered Quaker worship on a Sunday visit to London’s Gracechurch Street Meeting House (destroyed by fire in 1821). There he seems to have been disconcerted by the long stretches of silence, and the revelation that Friends had no priests, as he understood them. The fourth letter on Quakerism gives an account of William Penn, who ‘brought down upon earth the so much boasted golden age, which in all probability never existed but in Pennsylvania’.
Voltaire was not, however, writing during the seventeenth century, when the Quakers were founded, but in the eighteenth, when he detected signs of decline. Voltaire noted that the children of the first Quaker generation ‘are desirous of enjoying honours, of wearing buttons and ruffles; and quite ashamed of being called Quakers, they become converts to the Church of England, merely to be in the fashion’.
