who shared Montesquieu’s Deism, nevertheless attacked his Esprit des lois as
a reactionary defense of aristocratic privilege. Voltaire pinned his hopes on the
enlightened absolute ruler. Voltaire and Montesquieu had different bases of
material support; Montesquieu had hereditary property, while Voltaire de-
pended on intermittent patronage of the French court, aristocratic salons, and,
during the 1750s, a post as philosopher-poet in Berlin to Frederick the Great.
These external bases underwrote the difference between Montesquieu and
Voltaire; their commonalities came from their belonging to the same intellec-
tual networks, including the one which crystallized into the Encyclopedia.
Earlier both had been formed in the same London milieu; Voltaire in his first
exile in 1726–1729 had also frequented the Tory literary circle around Boling-
broke and Pope. Prior to this network contact Voltaire had been a rather
conventional epic poet and playwright, but he found his niche when he
returned to France and published his Lettres philosophiques sur l’Anglais
(1734). It contains the essentials which Voltaire was to embellish throughout
his life, in the form of oriental tales (emulating Montesquieu’s early specialty),
allegories, satires, and histories. Voltaire presents Newton and the English
as having found an enlightened, tolerant world based on reason and modera-
tion.
Voltaire claimed to occupy the middle ground between the intellectual
factions of his day; his Deism combatted not only the cruelties and superstitions
of dogmatic religion but also the materialism of the atheists. Scientific discov-
eries he now took as the central argument for a reasonable religion: God is
proven only by the argument from design, the watch proving the existence of
the watchmaker, scientific laws proving the existence of the Lawgiver. The
emphasis is on the laws, not on a material substance or on a mind-substance;
Voltaire uses Newton to reject materialism as well as metaphysics. Voltaire
represented the emerging attitude of militant scientism: science alone is enough;
no other philosophy of any type is desirable. Cartesianism, once the pretender
to constitute rational science, was now swept away as a mere philosophy.
Voltaire rejected the Deisms of both the Spinozaist and the Platonic lineages
in favor of an anti-metaphysical Deism.
This turn away from metaphysics was characteristic of the French and
English intellectual worlds of the time in contrast to the German networks;
there was no French equivalent of Wolff, Baumgarten, or Kant. The French
universities, with their connection to traditional training of clergy, were of no
significance even as centers of creative reaction; since 1600 their enrollments
had collapsed, and they lost control over the degrees monopolizing practice in
the professions.^21 The weak position of the universities and the more comfort-
able base of secular intellectuals among the salons and the government official-
dom allowed Voltaire to be a militant Deist. He defended the true religion of
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