What did Adam Smith and Voltaire discuss during the five or six times that they supposedly met in late 1765 and early 1766? Alas, no one really knows for sure. One source (Samuel Rogers, via Smith’s biographer John Rae) identifies just two possible topics of conversation:

Few memorials … of their conversation remain, and these are preserved by Samuel Rogers in his diary of his visit to Edinburgh the year before Smith’s death. They seem to have spoken, as was very natural, of the Duke of Richelieu, the only famous Frenchman Smith had yet met, and of the political question as to the revival of the provincial assemblies or the continuance of government by royal intendants. (Rae 1895, p. 189)

But this can’t be the whole story, for aside from the legendary martial and sexual exploits of Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, 3rd duc de Richelieu (1696-1788), who until then was “the only famous Frenchman Smith had yet met” (ibid.), or the contemporaneous “Brittany Affair”, an open and ongoing power struggle between the chief magistrate or procureur of the local courts of Brittany, Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais (1701-1785), and the governor and royal representative of the region, Emmanuel Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, duc d’Aiguillon (1720-1780), that was unfolding in real time in the fall of 1765, we can now say that Smith and Voltaire must have also discussed what Alain Alcouffe and I call the “Dillon Affair” or “fracas at Ferney” (see here, here, and here).

In addition, we can now add another important item to the list of topics that Smith must have discussed with Voltaire during his visits to Ferney, for when the Scottish philosopher arrived in Geneva in October 1765, Voltaire was writing a series of letter-essays — 20 in all — on a number of theological, political, and scientific questions that might have piqued a curious mind like Smith’s. (See, for example, this early edition of Voltaire’s “Collection des lettres sur les miracles: écrites a Geneve, et a Neufchatel”, the cover page of which is pictured below.) Today, these 20 letter-essays are referred as Voltaire’s Questions sur les Miracles (see, for example, here) or Lettres sur les Miracles (see here), but at the time of Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland, these letter-essays were circulating in Geneva in the form of individual pamphlets.

Voltaire had published his first letter-essay pamphlet in July 1765, and during the course of that year, he published nineteen more (see generally Shirley Roe, “Voltaire Versus Needham: Atheism, Materialism, and the Generation of Life,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1985), pp. 65-87, especially p. 73), so along with the Dillon Affair, his letter-essays were no doubt on his mind during Smith’s visits to Ferney. But what about Adam Smith? Did he take notice of any of these letter essays, and if so, did he read them? Although the original pamphlets were signed pseudonymously, Voltaire’s intended audience knew full well that only a mind as brilliant and a pen as witty as Voltaire’s could have written them. But most importantly from the perspective of someone like Adam Smith, many of the letters were addressed directly to John Turberville Needham, who not only happened to be the tutor of the young Charles Dillon — the same Dillon of the “Dillon Affair” described in our previous three posts — Needham was also known to the botanist Charles Bonnet, one of Smith’s acquaintances in Geneva.

It is entirely possible, of course, that Smith was totally oblivious or unaware of the then-raging “pamphlet war” between Voltaire and Dillon’s tutor when Smith made his first visit to Ferney in the fall of 1765. What is more unlikely, however, is that Smith left Geneva without any personal knowledge of this real-time Voltaire-Needham clash. But what was the controversy all about? Why did Voltaire devote so much attention to Needham in so many of his letter-essays? And why would the Scottish philosopher, of all people, take an interest in this ongoing affair? Alain Alcouffe and I will address these questions in our next few posts …