The Year They Both Died
On May 30, 1778, Voltaire died in Paris. He was eighty-three years old and had just returned to the city after a twenty-eight-year absence, welcomed with a triumph that contemporaries compared to the return of a conqueror. He had outlived his exile, outlived his enemies, outlived the censors who had burned his books, and arrived in Paris to find himself the most celebrated man in Europe. Six weeks later, on July 2, 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau died at Ermenonville, northeast of Paris, having spent the last years of his life in a state of elaborate and not entirely imaginary persecution. He was sixty-six. Neither man attended the other's funeral. Neither forgave the other. They were buried in the Panthéon, side by side, eleven years later, when the Revolution they had both (in very different ways) helped cause decided to honor them together. It was a posthumous reconciliation neither would have accepted in life.
Voltaire: The Skeptic Who Remade Europe
François-Marie Arouet — who renamed himself Voltaire at age twenty-four, a nom de plume he kept for life — was imprisoned in the Bastille twice, beaten by the servants of an aristocrat he had insulted, and exiled from France for extended periods, all before the age of forty. None of it stopped him. He simply moved to the border of French territory — first England, then Prussia, finally Ferney, just inside Switzerland — and kept writing. The output was staggering: plays, poems, histories, philosophical tales, pamphlets, and over 20,000 letters that constitute one of the great correspondences of European history.
His method was satire and clarity in combination. Candide (1759), written in three days according to legend (actually polished over several months), is the perfect expression of this method: a naive young man travels the world encountering earthquake, war, torture, and betrayal, while his mentor Pangloss insists that everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The joke is that Pangloss is quoting Leibniz, and Voltaire is demonstrating, with each catastrophe, that optimism as a philosophical position is an insult to the actual suffering of actual human beings. The novella sold out its first printing immediately, was banned immediately, and has never gone out of print.
Rousseau: The Romantic Who Remade Politics
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712, the son of a watchmaker, and spent his youth in a series of irregular situations — servant, music teacher, secretary, kept man — that gave him an intimate knowledge of social humiliation unusual for a philosopher. When he wrote about the suffering caused by inequality and social comparison, he was not theorizing in the abstract; he was reporting from experience. This biographical grounding gave his philosophy an emotional force that no amount of Voltairean wit could match.
His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) argued that human unhappiness was not a product of nature but of civilization — specifically of the invention of private property, which had introduced competition, vanity, and the corrosive need to compare oneself to others. Before property, humans had been self-sufficient and at peace. After it, they were enslaved to the opinions of their neighbors. The prescription followed from the diagnosis: society had to be restructured on the basis of genuine equality and authentic popular sovereignty. The French Revolutionaries found this argument irresistible. Robespierre carried a copy of The Social Contract in his pocket.
The Feud: What It Was Really About
When Rousseau published his first Discourse in 1750, arguing that the arts and sciences had corrupted morals rather than improving them, Voltaire was already the most celebrated writer in Europe — proof, in Rousseau's implicit argument, that literary celebrity was itself a symptom of civilizational corruption. The conflict was inherent before a word was exchanged between them. When Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his Discourse on Inequality in 1755, Voltaire replied with characteristic viciousness: "I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race, and I thank you for it... No one has ever employed so much intelligence to persuade men to be beasts."
The response was unfair but not entirely without point. Voltaire understood, correctly, that Rousseau's romanticism about natural human goodness was sentimental and unfounded — that the state of nature was not peaceful but brutal, and that civilization, for all its corruptions, was the only thing standing between human beings and the war of all against all. What Voltaire missed, or chose to miss, was that Rousseau was not actually recommending a return to the forest. He was diagnosing a social disease and proposing a cure. The disease was real. The cure was dangerous. Both things were true simultaneously.
Skepticism vs Sentiment: The Deeper Divide
The Voltaire-Rousseau quarrel was not merely a personal dispute between difficult men, though it was certainly that. It was a collision between two fundamentally different epistemological temperaments: skepticism and sentiment. Voltaire's great weapon was doubt. Doubt the Church, doubt the state, doubt authority, doubt every claim that cannot be verified. His instinct was always to ask: who benefits from your believing this? His religious tolerance was a form of epistemological humility — he did not know which religion, if any, was correct, and therefore no one should be persecuted for believing differently. His politics were essentially those of a cautious reformer: improve existing institutions, protect individual rights, reduce unnecessary suffering.
Rousseau's great weapon was feeling. Not reason but the authentic inner voice — the conscience that could not be argued away — was the guide to moral truth. This was a direct challenge to Voltairean rationalism, and it was one that history took seriously. Kant said that reading Rousseau had taught him that a common ploughman was as valuable as a philosopher. Romanticism, with its insistence on the authority of feeling against the tyranny of reason, was Rousseau's literary legacy. The political movements that appealed to authenticity, to the pure will of the people against the corrupt machinations of elites, were Rousseau's political legacy. Both the best and worst of modern democratic politics can be traced to him.
The Afterlife: Two Centuries of Unresolved Argument
In the two and a half centuries since their deaths, the argument between Voltaire and Rousseau has never been settled. Every generation replays it in new contexts. The 19th century's Romantic movement against Enlightenment rationalism was Rousseau's victory. The 20th century's liberal democratic constitutionalism against populist authoritarianism was Voltaire's. The 21st century's anti-establishment movements, with their appeals to authentic popular will against corrupt elites, are Rousseauian in spirit. The liberal institutions that protect minorities and individual rights against those movements are Voltairean in structure.
Voltaire, had he lived to see the French Revolution, would have been disgusted and probably guillotined. He was too ironic, too skeptical of enthusiasm, too aristocratic in his sensibility to have survived the Terror. Rousseau, had he lived to see it, would have been — according to most historians — equally disgusted, and equally in danger. The Revolution that invoked his name was not what he had described. But the invokers were not wrong to find his ideas there. An idea that produces a revolution is not diminished by what the revolution produces. It is complicated by it. That complication is the permanent condition of Rousseau's legacy, as clarity is the permanent condition of Voltaire's.