Free Anglomania by Ian Buruma Page A

children. The entire Academy—except for its clerical members—waited for him at the theater as he arrived in a blue carriage covered with gold stars to see the performance of his play. When he entered the theater, leaning on his cane, the crowd stood up to cheer: “Long live Voltaire! Long live the universal man!” The stage curtain opened to reveal a bust of Voltaire, and the actors and actresses filed past, one by one, to crown its marble head with laurel wreaths. More people waited to see Voltaire outside, after the performance was over. “What crowds to greet you!” an admirer said. “Just as many as would come to see me on the scaffold,” he answered.
    Two months later Voltaire was dead. Cancer of the prostate. The church refused to bury him. A common ditch was pronounced good enough, as it had been for his old lover, Adrienne Lecouvreur. But Voltaire was spared this final indignity, which he had feared all his life, by his friends, who secretly drove his embalmed corpse, still splendidly got up in dressing gown and tassled hat, out of town on a moonlit night. They buried the body outside Paris. But first they removed theheart, which was sent to Ferney, and later, in 1864, back to Paris, where it was placed in the Salon d’honneur of the Bibliothèque nationale. It is still there.
    Precisely ten years after Voltaire’s death the Revolution came. His corpse was moved to Paris not long after, to be reburied with full revolutionary honors in the Panthéon. He might have enjoyed the attention. But the effect on his reputation in Britain would have pleased him less. France was no longer identified with popery and foppishness, but with dangerous radicalism. To be “Frenchified” was not effete, but revolutionary. And Voltaire, blamed first, with some justification, for unleashing Anglomania in France, was now blamed by British and French monarchists for the French Revolution itself. Voltaire had promoted English liberty as a universal good, a tree to be planted in every country. But English nationalists saw liberty as uniquely English, a reflection of the sincere character of the English people and its plain Protestant ethic. Voltaire was a sophisticate, a radical, an atheist, and a Frog.
    Displayed at the British Museum is a cream-colored earthenware Staffordshire mug, made in 1793. The style and the material are expressions of how the English began to see themselves: plain, simple, God-fearing, and honest, like a slab of roast beef or a tweed coat. On one side of the mug we read the English concept of liberty, and on the other side the French. Religion, honesty, and independence were the English virtues. Atheism, murder, and equality marked the French. Egalité had become a dirty word in England, something akin to godlessness.
    A political print of 1803 makes a similar point in more gory detail. It is called The Arms of France and shows a guillotine, dripping with blood, supported by a grinning ape sporting a tricolor sash and a red hat, trimmed with jester’s bells. The ape is holding a tricolor flag inscribed ATHEISM , and he is sitting on Voltaire’s books. Dangling beneath this pretty ensemble, like a dirty little rag, is a pamphlet on the rights of man by Tom Paine. Paine’s idea of universal rights had cast him in the role of a dishonorable Frenchman. Cosmopolitanism was now as foreign as the notion of equality.
    There were of course supporters of the Revolution in Britain, like Paine. Radicalism and egalitarianism, often but not always inspired by religion, have always had a place in English history. Under Cromwellradicalism turned violent. But the Glorious Revolution was to be Britain’s last revolution. Despite the example of Wilkes and others, the mainstream of British politics was no longer threatened by radical upheavals. And conservatism was presented more and more as a natural, organic product of the English soil. If such thinkers as Locke and Newton had inspired the men and women of the