What did Adam Smith discuss with Voltaire during his three-month sojourn in Switzerland? One topic of conversation may have been the Voltaire-Needham controversy that was then playing out in real time in the summer and fall of 1765. In July of that year, Voltaire began writing a series of three pamphlets in reply to a new book by David Claparède on the subject of miracles. (As an aside, Claparède’s book, Considerations sur les miracles de l’Evangile (see here), was in turn a reply to the third letter of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s collection of letter-essays, Letters from the Mountain.) Although he is little remembered today, at the time Claparède was a prominent Calvinist preacher and theologian in Geneva. Among other things, he gave lectures at the University of Geneva (where Charles Bonnet and Georges-Louis Le Sage also taught) from 1763 to 1798 and was also its rector from 1770 to 1774 (see Campagnolo 2020).

Suffice it to say that Voltaire’s reply to Claparède on the question of miracles is vintage Voltaire: witty, satirical, and scathing. For Voltaire, it was totally ridiculous that God would violate the eternal laws of nature in order to interfere in the mundane affairs of man. Why, he asks, would God make the moon stand still in the heavens for several hours so that Joshua could massacre the Amorites? Soon, however, Voltaire turns his attention from Claparède to Needham, for after the first three of Voltaire’s letters-essays had appeared in Geneva, the English natural philosopher decided to come to Claparède’s rescue, so to speak.

Specifically, Needham began writing his own series of replies to Voltaire in the form of three anonymous pamphlets: (i) “Réponse d’un theologien au docte proposant des autres questions” [hereinafter “Réponse”], (ii) “Parodie de la troisieme lettre du proposant addressee a un philosophe” [“Parodie”], and (iii) “Projet de notes instructives, veridiques, theologiques, historiques & critiques sur certaines brochures polemiques du tem[p]s, adressees aux dignes editeurs des doctes ouvrages duproposant” [“Projet”]. According to Shirley Roe (1985, p. 74 n. 24), Needham’s first two pamphlets were written in August 1765, while the third one was probably written in November 1765. (In addition, Needham published a revised edition of his second pamphlet in February 1766.)

In summary, Needham’s first reply pamphlet, “Réponse”, considers the problem of miracles from a scientific perspective: can the reports of so many miracles in the Gospels, for example, be reconciled with reason and natural philosophy? Voltaire took notice: his fourth letter-essay on miracles is a direct reply to Needham’s first pamphlet. At the time, however, Voltaire did not know the true identity of the author of the “Réponse”, but as soon as he discovered that it was none other than Needham, Voltaire then launched a full-scale personal vendetta against him, starting with his sixth letter-essay on miracles! As Alain Alcouffe and I mentioned in our previous post (“Voltaire’s vendetta”), Voltaire hurls a stream of vicious epithets against his newfound nemesis. Among other things (see Roe 1985, p. 75; Roe 1983, p. 181), Voltaire christens Needham “the eelmonger” (“l’Anguillard“) and falsely accuses him of being an “Irish Jesuit” (“Jésuite Irlandois“), and in addition to these spurious ad hominem attacks, the supposedly-enlightened Frenchman commits the strawman fallacy: Voltaire paints an intentionally inaccurate picture of Needham’s “ridiculous system” (“système ridicule“) and ascribes a godless and dangerous materialist-atheist outlook to him, a worldview that the English natural philosopher himself had repeatedly and vehemently rejected.

Alas, it looks like Voltaire was an extremely touchy literary figure, to say the least, for the Lumière must have abhorred being called out or criticized by name. Two important questions, however, remain unanswered. (1) We know that Adam Smith was in Geneva at this time, but was Smith aware of the Voltaire-Needham clash, and if so, what did he make of it? And (2) we also know that Needham was the young Charles Dillon’s tutor at this time, but did Voltaire’s strongly-worded fifth letter-essay have anything to do with the violent “Dillon Affair” that erupted in December 1765? Alain Alcouffe and I will turn to those two questions when we resume our series on Adam Smith in Switzerland next week …