A Clash with Democracy 105
the French parlements, he was also converted by events at Geneva to as nearly
democratic an outlook as he ever attained. The very men who had supported Rous-
seau—d’Ivernois, de Luc, and the others—now that Rousseau had left, and with
initial embarrassments and misgivings, accepted the aid offered by Voltaire. “The
more I have come to know your citizens,” Voltaire wrote to d’Ivernois, “the more I
have come to like them.”^31 He wrote his Idées républicaines in praise of Geneva. The
“republicanization” of Voltaire may be accounted another of the universal influ-
ences of the city by Lake Leman.
Voltaire went beyond Rousseau and the Geneva Burghers. The old mischief-
maker and humanitarian actually took to befriending the Natives. He wrote a trag-
edy, Les Scythes, to exalt the virtues of a stalwart and unrefined people. He had
Natives come to his house, advised them on their political tactics, and created a
model village on his estates where they could pursue their watch- making and
other trades when life became too difficult at Geneva. Indeed, one of the argu-
ments of the Burghers, when they repressed the Natives in 1770, was that the
whole Native question had simply been stirred up by their old enemy, Voltaire.
The Burgher revolution of 1768 at Geneva was “democratic” only in a certain
sense, though an important one. It was democatic in that it was antiaristocratic,
that it opposed self- perpetuation in government, that it held government officials
to be only removable delegates, and countered the theory of the constituted bodies
with the theory of the Sovereignty of the People. The Représentants never called
their movement “democratic.” But it looked like Absolute Democracy to Choiseul
because it subverted the society based upon Orders. That the People need include
everyone, that universal equal suffrage was the principal mark of democracy, was
neither a significant theory nor an issue in practical politics at the time. Even the
Geneva Natives did not clearly assert it.
The new regime was sufficiently democratic for the more vehement aristocrats
not to accept it. They had not consented to it, but only abstained from voting. In
1782 there was a counterrevolution at Geneva. The Geneva aristocracy, again ap-
pealing to foreign aid, for the third time since 1738, and this time obtaining the
military intervention of France, succeeded in annulling the Edict of 1768. They
rebuilt their theater, and settled down to those civilized diversions of which the
mad Rousseau had wanted to deprive them. Geneva, too, in the 1780’s, was to have
its aristocratic resurgence.
31 Chaponnière, op. cit., 214. That Voltaire’s Idées républicaines arose not from general ideas so
much as from Voltaire’s involvement in and knowledge of the situation at Geneva is shown in the
forthcoming work of Peter J. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist, to be published in 1959 by the
Princeton University Press.