Anglomania by Ian Buruma Read Free Book Online Page A

at the British tabloids with horror. European politicians and bureaucrats—“ UP YOURS, DELORS !”—are easily offended by them. The mixture of prurience, hypocrisy, and xenophobia is not a pretty one. The humor is that of the seaside postcard turned vicious. But Voltaire recognized the link with his idea of England: “ ’Tis great pity that your nation is overrun with such prodigious numbers of scandal and scurrilities! However one ought to look upon them as the bad fruits of a very good tree called liberty.”
    He wrote this in 1749 to his friend Sir Everard Fawkener, a silk merchant with a taste for antique coins. Voltaire worked on his English while staying at Fawkener’s house in Wandsworth. No doubt Fawkener, a studious bachelor with a deep knowledge of the classics, was soothing company. And Wandsworth, still a village then, was a good place for Voltaire to concentrate on his studies. But there was something else. Fawkener’s class, and not the aristocracy, conformed most closely to Voltaire’s ideal of England. After his return to France, he was fond of repeating to English (and Scottish) visitors, with increasing frequency as he got older, that England was like a hogshead of beer: froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, the middle excellent.
    Voltaire was interested in business. He approved of trade. He was good at making money himself. The idea of free trade was crucial to his Anglophilia. A visit to the Royal Exchange in London elicited a tribute to the business of making money that makes Voltaire sound like a nineteenth-century liberal, or a twentieth-century Thatcherite. The Royal Exchange, he wrote in Letters concerning the English Nation , was a “place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.” In the marketplace, men of every creed have to work together in mutual trust. Then, after business is done, this man “is baptiz’d in a great tub,” and that man “has his son’s foreskin cut off,” while yet others “retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on.” This is shrewd and funny enough, but then comes the most often quoted paragraph: “If one religiononly were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut each other’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.”
    This was a little too ideal to be true. How happy were, say, the Roman Catholics to be deprived of government jobs and the right to vote? Still, Voltaire’s admiration for the marketplace put him firmly in the liberal Anglo-Saxon tradition. This included the marketplace for religious creeds. He watched Quakers babbling and quaking with the same fascination as a European watching TV evangelists in the United States today. Trade, he wrote in Letters , not only enriched the citizens in England, but it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom extended their commerce, which was the source of Britain’s glory. Coming from a nation whose economy still depended largely on patronage, and where trade was treated with disdain, Voltaire was impressed by a country where merchants compared themselves to the citizens of Rome and even aristocrats took an active part in trade.
    This, too, was an exaggeration: there was plenty of snobbery about trade in Britain too, and aristocratic patronage was still of huge importance. But the idea of the nation of traders and shopkeepers was not entirely beside the point. Voltaire saw how the landowning class was enriching itself by dabbling in the marketplace. The fact—highly unusual in Europe—that aristocratic titles were inherited by eldest sons, while the younger ones went into business, meant that lofty