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Investigative philosophy, with a light touch

Thursday, June 24, 2010

DATELINE: Paris – One point of being in an overseas capital is to get challenging new perspectives. And sure enough, I was jolted to see Le Monde crediting a writer I already admired with being, to my surprise, “the father of investigative journalism”.

To which individual does the greatest newspaper of the Francophone world, among the greatest of the entire world, boldly assign paternity for this vital - though nowadays endangered - species of reporting? None other than Voltaire (born 1694, as Francois-Marie Arouet … but more of his name-change later, and of other name-related matters, too).

We more likely know Voltaire - or at least I do - as a combative and witty philosopher who was emblematic of the originally Scottish (before it was declared here to be distinctly French) Enlightenment period, and as the author of Candide, that wonderfully comic satire on societal ethics. But I have never associated him strongly with journalism, except in that he prefigured - as one of France’s first ‘public intellectuals’ - an entire school of news-reactive opinion-writing, which shows up today as editorials and Op-Eds the world over. 

And to me he’s certainly served as an international patron saint (and of course a secular one) for freedom of speech. On the first glimpse my darling wife Melissa Bellinelli and I had early in our current vacation here, from a speeding taxi, of our well-loved restaurant Le Voltaire - named for him of course, and housed in the building where he died in 1778 - we promptly played the “Which Quotation First Comes to Mind?” game. What came up for me was that crisp personal endorsement of the principle behind America’s First Amendment, reputedly expressed by Voltaire a good three decades before the Bill of Rights was written and frequently cited in its support ever since: “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

I pedantically emphasize that this is a “reputed” Voltairism, although it’s famous worldwide and always presumed authentic, because I checked during this Parisian sojourn (urged on by long-remembered orders from my very first, very demanding investigations editor: “Double-triple check EVERYTHING!”). I was chastened to discover that there’s no French original to be found anywhere for these resonant words. It’s a mere paraphrase, from one of his now-lost letters, which was summarized by the biographer E. Beatrice Hall in her influential English study “The Friends of Voltaire” back in 1907.

Voltaire’s forceful expressions of opinion, plus his insistence on the tolerant acceptance of others’ opinions, are now well-appreciated aspects of the man’s genius. But the often sole-destroying pavement-pounding of an investigative reporter? Is that really an aspect too?

Indeed yes, I’ve learned. In his later years (well, in his sixties ... he lived until 84, after all) Voltaire turned to wearing down his once dandily-delicate shoe-leather in door-to-door evidence-gathering, hard at work to produce thoroughly researched exposes of wrongful arrests and convictions, and of institutional corruption. It began with the horrific Calas Case.

Jean Calas was a Protestant businessman in the south-western city of Toulouse convicted – after being tortured – of the ‘hate-crime’ murder (as we might call it today) of his 28-year old son, a convert to Catholicism.  The elder Calas was executed, horribly enough, by strangulation.

Voltaire spent two years amassing evidence to prove that, despite the prosecution’s claims, Jean Calas was in fact very tolerant of Catholics, including his son, and that - more dramatically - the son was in reality a chronic depressive who had killed himself in a fit of self-hatred. The murder verdict was overturned in the Supreme Paris Court. The King was moved to provide a large financial settlement for the doubly-bereaved family.

Voltaire went on to investigate and expose many more cases of injustice over a further twelve years, always setting the authorities aflutter and panicky when he did so.

 

  

 

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AN EARLY SIGN OF HIS CAPACITY for what we might today call marketing, was that the philosopher-journalist totally re-branded himself in his twenties, after he’d already achieved fame as a poet.  Some letter-jumbling went on, worthy of an anagram-loving crossword-puzzler or a Scrabble-player - if they cheated a little, that is. His quotidian name Arouet le J (in abbreviation of Arouet le Jeune, ‘the young Arouet’) became the striking Voltaire. The little bit of cheating came in when he made J stand in for an I, and U become (in the style of a chiseled Roman inscription) the inItial V.

His new identity, without meaning anything specific, carried suggestions of vaulting upward, and perhaps of volte-face, someone whipping round fast to confront a challenge. Nowadays the manufactured name is everywhere in Paris. The River Seine’s left-bank quai carries it along the stretch where the building stands in which he died, and where that classic bistro named in homage to him does great, somewhat clubby, business among the district’s antique and art dealers (and serves, by the way, the best ever gigot d’agneau in my recollection).

There’s also a Metro station, several streets of varying importance from a major Boulevard to a tiny impasse way out (rather surprisingly) on the south-western edge of the 16th arrondissement, plus of course any number of city institutes of learning. Oh, and throughout France - or at least the France of interior decorating - a kind of upright armchair, said to be good for reading, is called un voltaire.

And this being Paris after all, there are multiple statues (as well as all the portraits in paint) to honor him, from high up in the Louvre’s elaborate façade … to the garden shrubbery of the Institut de France ... to down in the Pantheon’s cool crypt where he’s buried. You can’t move far in this city without being aware (in a way still unusual for many a writer) of just how he looked.



ALL THE REPRESENTATIONS capture his infamous smile (or smirk, depending upon - sometimes literally and physically - your point of view). And I owe much of my further understanding of Voltaire to a delightful essay invitingly titled Voltaire’s Grin by Richard Holmes, the 'total immersion' biographer I have praised here before (mostly for his work on the interlinked poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth) .

From Holmes, though, and from other sources I already knew that Coleridge was very leery, however engaging he may have found Voltaire’s writings, about that smile – calling it the typical expression of  “a French hairdresser”. Coleridge, it has to be said, took everything … all pain, all pleasure, and all ambiguity … desperately seriously. Voltaire on the other hand reveled in a sense of humor which was multi-directional and very often sharply self-effacing; he compared his own  facial appearance to that of a maimed monkey, “un singe estropie”.

Holmes makes a convincing case for the Voltairean smile being all of a piece with the memorable “bon mots” we associate with this powerful (and again pointedly unpious) preacher of tolerance. His philosophical quips - what he himself said were efforts “to be very brief and slightly spicy” - were, according to Holmes, “the verbal equivalents, the linguistic icons, of Voltaire’s mocking grin”.

And Voltaire’s overall rallying call isn’t a bad one for all of us to follow … philosophers, journalists, indeed anyone pursuing a thoughtful life, and not solemnly respecting the status quo too much. He urged: “Let us always march forward along the highway of Truth, my brothers, grinning derisively”.

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