prior probability

In this post (and our next one), Alain Alcouffe and I will address the following questions: Why did the leaders of the Republic of Geneva try to suppress The Social Contract, and what role, if any, did Marc Turretin — one of the magistrates or “syndics” of Geneva that Adam Smith met during his sojourn in the Swiss city-state — play in this sordid affair? Also, did Adam Smith take notice of this controversy during his visit to Geneva, and if so, whose side was he on, the Syndics’ or Rousseau’s?

By all accounts, the main reason the authorities in Geneva (including syndics like Marc Turretin) had for censoring The Social Contract and issuing an arrest warrant against Rousseau himself was his chapter on civic religion. (See Book 4, Ch. 8 of The Social Contract.) Among other things, Rousseau presents a scathing indictment of organized religion and concludes that Christianity and democracy are incompatible (emphasis in the original):

But I’m wrong to speak of a Christian republic—those two terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. Genuine Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and don’t much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes. (The Social Contract, Book 4, Ch. 8)

At the time, however, the Republic of Geneva presented herself as a bastion of religious and political liberty (a reasonable assessment given the prevalence of absolute monarchies in the rest of Europe), and many Genevans prided themselves on their Calvinist and republican traditions. [See generally Pamela A. Mason, “The Genevan political background to Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract'”, History of Political Thought, Vol. 14, no. 4 (1993), pp. 547-572.] Rousseau’s Social Contract, however, not only questioned this conventional wisdom; it threw a metaphorical grenade into an already volatile political situation. To put Rousseau’s dangerous diatribe against Geneva’s faux democracy into historical context, some background information about Geneva’s 18th-century constitutional system is in order.

In brief, the power to make and enforce laws in Geneva was divided among three corporate entities or political bodies, a constitutional arrangement going back to the days of John Calvin: (i) a general council consisting of all the male citizens of Geneva aged 25 or older, (ii) a legislature called the Grand Council or Council of the Two Hundred (as its name implies, this body contained 200 members), and (iii) a quasi executive-judicial body called the Small Council or Council of Twenty-Five. (See, e.g., Mason 1993, p. 551.) The small council, in turn, was led by four magistrates called “syndics”, whose appointments were rubber-stamped by the general council from pre-approved slates (ibid.).

But the one aspect of this constitutional arrangement that must have infuriated someone like Rousseau the most was the utter political impotency of Geneva’s general council. It could not deliberate on any matters not previously approved by the grand and small councils; it lacked the power to impeach or recall the syndics; and to make matters worse, it played no role in the election of the grand and small councils (Mason 1993, p. 555). Indeed, the most odd aspect of Geneva’s constitution was that the Grand Council and the Small Council formed a “closed loop”: the Small Council chose the membership of the Two Hundred and the Two Hundred chose the membership of the small council (ibid.).

During the 18th century, however, a group of reformers calling themselves the Représentants began to question these arrangements and rebel against the syndics. Their struggle would culminate in the so-called “Geneva Revolution of 1782” (see here, for example), a precursor to the great French Revolution that began in 1789. [See generally Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century, Yale University Press (2012).] But at the time of the publication of Rousseau’s “Social Contract” in 1762 and Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765, the Geneva Revolution of 1782 was still decades away. Nevertheless, although this decades-long constitutional struggle in Geneva had yet to be fully resolved in the 1760s, Rousseau’s radical critique of Geneva’s morally and politically corrupt constitution — corrupt because the general council did not represent the true will of the people given its limited power and the closed loop between the grand and small councils — no doubt struck a raw chord among the syndics and defenders of the status quo and must have been a topic of conversation in Adam Smith’s Geneva circle during his sojourn in Switzerland.

Assuming the Scottish philosopher did take notice of this constitutional controversy during his visit to Geneva, what did he make of it? Specifically, did he openly defend the marketplace of ideas in true classical liberal fashion (i.e. did he champion Rouseau’s freedom to criticize the system without fear of legal prosecution), or was he complicit in Rousseau’s predicament and in the censorship of the syndics through his esoteric silence? Alain Alcouffe and I will turn to these all-important questions in our next post …

As Alain Alcouffe and I mentioned in our previous post, the rather mysterious-sounding “Syndic Turretin” is mentioned in passing in John Rae’s biography of Adam Smith (Rae 1895, p. 191). According to Rae, this particular individual was one of the many leading lights whom Smith met and befriended during his extended sojourn in Switzerland, but who was this “Syndic Turretin”, and what might Smith have learned from him?

In summary, he was most likely Marc Turretin (1712–1793), a career politician who was appointed to Geneva’s Conseil des Deux-Cents (Council of the Two Hundred) in 1746 and who would eventually rise to the highest ranks of power in the Swiss city-state, elected one of four “syndics” or chief magistrates of the Republic of Geneva, a powerful legal-political post going back to the days of John Calvin. Turretin was also a husband and a father — he wed Françoise Boissier (1716–1797) in 1733 and had one son, Jean Alphonse Turretin [Jr.] (1735–1779), who predeceased him in 1779 — and was descended from a distinguished Swiss-Italian brood, the Turrettini family (see generally Tripet 2012). The syndic was the son of Jean Alphonse Turretin [Sr.] (1671–1737), one of the leading “enlightened orthodox” public intellectuals in Geneva during his day (Klauber 1990, p. 328).

Among other things, his father Jean Alphonse was a professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva (appointed in 1705 to replace his mentor, Louis Tronchin), had led the movement to abrogate the formulaic and outdated Formula consensus ecclesiarum Helveticarum (see here, for example) in 1706, and “was also instrumental in building a more secular curriculum at the Academy through the addition of a Chair of Mathematics in 1704 and a special two-year humanities course in 1722” in order to make the Academy more competitive with other more secular universities to draw more foreign students (Klauber 1990, p. 327). Jean Alphonse [Sr.] was also a prolific scholar; among his most important works are his Cogitationes et dissertationes theologicae on the principles of natural and revealed religion (2 vols., Geneva, 1737; in French, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne). (See Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), Vol. 27, p. 483, available here; see also Gargett 1991.) In short, given his father’s theological background and scholarly credentials, it is safe to assume that Marc Turretin was brought up in a pious and highly-educated household.

But what did Adam Smith and Marc Turretin, the Scottish moral philosopher and the Swiss statesman, discuss during their encounters in Geneva in late 1765/early 1766? (Alain Alcouffe and I assume they met more than once given the length of Smith’s sojourn in Geneva and the small size of the Swiss city-state.) Several possible topics of conversation come to mind. Perhaps they talked about the Dillon Affair of December 1765, for Turretin himself, in his capacity as syndic, might be called on to decide the legal dispute between Voltaire and Charles Dillon. Possibly, they compared notes on a much-discussed essay that must have hit close to home for Turretin, d’Alembert’s controversial entry for “Genève” in the 7th volume of the Encyclopédie (available here, by the way), an article that according Friedrich Melchior Grimm had “caused much uproar” (Grimm 1758). Or maybe Turretin filled Smith in on the latest developments in the ongoing political tug-of-war over taxation among Geneva’s main factions (see, e.g., Whatmore 2012).

But the one topic that could not have escaped their attention was the whereabouts of Geneva’s most famous native son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was, after all, the syndics who just three years earlier (1762) had condemned one of Rousseau’s most recent works, The Social Contract, and issued a warrant for his arrest! What was Turretin’s role in this affair, and whose side was Adam Smith on, Turretin or Rousseau’s? Rest assured, Alain Alcouffe and I will address these questions and revisit the troubled Rousseau and his relationship to the Republic of Geneva in our next post.

In addition to the great Voltaire and his mistress Madame Denis, Adam Smith met and befriended many other noteworthy men and women during his extended sojourn in the picturesque Swiss city-state of Geneva (pictured below, circa 1780). Among these illustrious individuals are (in alphabetical order) Charles Bonnet (1720–1793); Marie Louise Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld, the duchesse d’Enville (1716–1797) and her son Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, 6th Duke of La Rochefoucauld (1743–1792); Georges-Louis Le Sage (1724-1803); Philip Stanhope, 2nd Earl Stanhope (1714–1786), his wife Grizel Hamilton (Lady Stanhope), and their son Charles, who would become the 3rd Earl Stanhope; and last but not least, Theodore Tronchin (1709–1781). Another person, however, who should be added to this list of international luminaries in Adam Smith’s exclusive Geneva circle is “the Syndic Turretin“. [On this note, see John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (1895), p. 191.]

But who exactly was this Turretin, and what did Adam Smith learn from him? Alain Alcouffe and I will turn to those questions in our next post; in the meantime, we will say a few words about Turretin’s title or honorific, “Syndic”. One historical source identifies “Le Syndic Turretin” as the “Mayor” of Geneva [see Warwick Lister, Amico: The Life of Giovanni Battista Viotti (2009), p. 43], while for his part Smith’s biographer John Rae calls him “the President of the Republic” [Rae 1895, p. 191]. But as we shall see in our next post, Turretin was neither a president nor a mayor, properly speaking. Instead, it would be more accurate to describe him as one of four chief magistrates of the Geneva Republic, for at the time, Geneva was led by four syndics. (For reference, see this entry in d’Alembert and Diderot’s famed Encyclopédie.) This observation, in turn, is noteworthy for us because, in his capacity as syndic or magistrate, Turrentin may have been called on to resolve the legal dispute between Voltaire and Charles Dillon (the Dillon Affair), and he may have also been instrumental in his city-state’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against the great Rousseau and ban his works in 1762 … (to be continued)

Thus far, Alain Alcouffe and I have explored two important incidents that coincided with Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765/early 1766: (1) the Voltaire-Needham clash over the question of miracles, and (2) the “Dillon Affair” or “Fracas at Ferney”, which led to legal proceedings against a young English hunter. But we have left one key question open: what did Smith really think of Voltaire? To the point, if Smith truly admired this great Enlightenment literary figure as much as Smith’s biographers have led us to believe, then why does Voltaire appear but once in The Wealth of Nations? In fact, Smith refers to Voltaire only in passing toward the end of a lengthy section titled “Of the Expense of the Institutions for the Instruction of People of all Ages” buried deep in the dense pages of Book V of The Wealth of Nations (see WN, Book V, Chapter 1, Part Third, Art. 3, para. 39), where Smith writes:

It is observed by Mr. de Voltaire, that Father Porrée, a Jesuit of no great eminence in the republic of letters, was the only professor they had ever had in France whose works were worth the reading. In a country which has produced so many eminent men of letters, it must appear somewhat singular that scarce one of them should have been a professor in a university. *** The observation of Mr. de Voltaire may be applied, I believe, not only to France, but to all other Roman Catholic countries. We very rarely find, in any of them, an eminent man of letters who is a professor in a university, except, perhaps, in the professions of law and physic; professions from which the church is not so likely to draw them.

To make matters worse, the great Voltaire appears absolutely nowhere (i.e. zero times!) in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), despite the fact that Smith made substantial revisions to this great work in 1790! For my part (I won’t speak for my colleague, co-author, and friend Alain Alcouffe here), the logical inference I draw from the utter paucity of references to Voltaire in Smith’s two great magnum opera is this: whatever Smith may have first thought of Voltaire (see, for example, the last paragraph of Smith’s 1756 letter to the short-lived Edinburgh Review, which Alain Alcouffe and I discuss here), Voltaire most likely lost most of his luster after Smith had met him in person during his sojourn in Switzerland. Why? Because Voltaire’s pride, vanity, and total lack of “self-command” in the pursuit of his vendetta against John Needham, i.e. Voltaire’s resorting to name-calling and the distorted picture he paints of Needham’s groundbreaking work on spontaneous generation — coupled with his poor handling of the “Dillon Affair”, i.e. Voltaire’s decision to take legal action against the hunter whose dog his own gamekeeper had killed — both of which incidents Smith himself no doubt observed first-hand during his Swiss sojourn — may have simply been too much for the prudent Scottish philosopher to bear.

Alain Alcouffe and I will resume our series on Adam Smith in Switzerland soon; in the meantime, pictured below is a Genevan coin for six sols minted in 1765, the year of Smith’s first and only visit to the small but prosperous Swiss city-state during his grand tour years with the 3d Duke of Buccleuch. (More details about the Republic of Geneva’s coinage in the 18th century are available here, via Wikipedia.)

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 …

In our previous post “Adam Smith and the Voltaire-Needham Affair“, Alain Alcouffe and I introduced “Collection des lettres sur les miracles: écrites a Geneve, et a Neufchatel” (better known today as Questions sur les Miracles), a series of twenty witty letter-essays that the world-famous Voltaire was busy composing during Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in the fall of 1765. We also mentioned that some of these letter-essays are addressed to a contemporary natural philosopher and priest, John Turberville Needham (pictured below). That, however, is putting it mildly, for Voltaire did not just “address” some of his pamphlets to Needham; instead, it would be more accurate to say that the famed Enlightenment literary figure launched a full-scale personal vendetta against the English natural philosopher, one that he would pursue in one form or another until his death in 1778! (See generally Roe 1985, especially pp. 73-82.)

Among other things (see 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, p. 75; see also Roe 1983, p. 181), Voltaire christens Needham “the eelmonger” (“l’Anguillard“) and falsely accuses him of being an Irish Jesuit to boot (“Jésuite Irlandois“). (One can only imagine what Voltaire must have thought of him in private!) In addition to these spurious ad hominem attacks, the supposedly-enlightened Frenchman commits the strawman fallacy in many of his letter-essays: 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. But these observations beg an important question: If Needham’s scientific theories were so absurd or “ridiculous”, then why did one of the greatest men of letters of the Enlightenment era direct so much fury and invective against them? What fueled Voltaire’s literary and intellectual fire? And did Adam Smith take notice of “Voltaire’s vendetta” during his sojourn in Switzerland?

Suffice it to say, Alain Alcouffe and I will address these questions in our next few posts …

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 …

Although Alain Alcouffe and I have already described what we call “the fracas at Ferney” or “Dillon Affair” in our previous two posts (see here and here), we shall now restate the relevant facts and main sequence of events below for reference (our footnotes appear below the fold):

(1) The setting: A hunting party consisting of five men, including one Charles Dillon, a young English aristocrat who had a reputation for gambling [see footnote 1], is trespassing somewhere on Voltaire’s private property, located a few miles northwest of Geneva in the village of Ferney, on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 7;

(2) Inciting incident: Next, one of Dillon’s hunting dogs is killed–most likely by one of Voltaire’s gamekeepers, either by accident or in self-defense (perhaps the dog had attacked the gamekeeper), or if Voltaire’s mistress Madame Denis is to be believed, the hound was killed by “the townspeople of Ferney” (“les gens du village de ferney“);

(3) Escalation of the conflict: Angry at the killing of his dog, Dillon not only threatens to burn down Voltaire’s house; he also rounds up four men armed with rifles and pistols (“quatre personnes armées de fusils et de pistolets“) and returns to Voltaire’s estate on Monday, Dec. 9, searching for the gamekeeper who he believed had killed his bloodhound and threatening to capture him “dead or alive”;

(4) Voltaire retaliates with a lawsuit: The very next day (!), Tuesday, Dec. 10, Voltaire and Madame Denis initiate legal proceedings against Charles Dillon, alleging that “[t]he gamekeeper whom Mr Dillon pursued with force in Ferney, attempting to escape from him, broke his back and is in life-threatening condition” (“Le garde chasse chez lequel Monsieur Dillon alla avec main forte à ferney, aiant voulu se dérober à sa poursuitte, s’est cassé les reins, et est en danger de la vie“);

(5) Voltaire’s mistress’s legal memo: And last but not least, Madame Denis — or perhaps it was Voltaire himself — drafts a legal memorandum dated Dec. 10-11 explaining her side of the story, a copy of which somehow ends up with Adam Smith.

Did Charles Dillon ever answer the charges against him? What was the outcome of this peculiar case? And most importantly, what does Adam Smith have to do with any of the events described above? We know the Scottish moral philosopher and travelling tutor was residing in Geneva at the time (a map of which, circa 1777, is pictured below) and that he was most likely already personally acquainted with the great Voltaire — according to one historical account [see footnote 2], for example, Smith had visited Voltaire five or six times during this period — but what we do not know is why he received a copy of Madame Denis’s memorandum.

In brief, as far as Alain Alcouffe and I can tell, there are three possible reasons why Voltaire, via Madame Denis, might want to keep someone like Adam Smith in the loop:

One possibility is strategic: maybe Madame Denis simply wanted to share her side of the story with Smith and his pupils Duke Henry and Hew Campbell Scott — recall that Smith was still a travelling tutor during his sojourn in Switzerland — or at least put them on notice that something serious had occurred at Voltaire’s estate, especially since her complaint is directed against a young English aristocrat who might have been personally known to Smith or his pupils. (Recall that Geneva’s population was not only small (about 24,000 inhabitants); the Swiss city-state was also a popular grand tour destination for British travellers at the time [see note 3].) Another clue along these lines is that Madame Denis’s legal memorandum is not addressed to Adam Smith in particular; instead, she writes, referring to herself in the third person, that “Madame Denis submits these actions to the judgment of all the English gentlemen currently in Geneva” (“Madame Denis fait juges de ces procédés tous les gentils hommes anglais qui sont à genêve“).

Another possibility might have to do with the pending legal proceedings that Voltaire and Madame Denis had already initiated against Charles Dillon on Tuesday, Dec. 10. That is, perhaps they wanted to recruit Smith to participate in the case, either as an informal advisor or as maybe even as a witness, especially if one of Smith’s previous visits to Ferney coincided with Charles Dillon’s original hunting excursion on Saturday, Dec. 7, or with his return on Monday, Dec. 9, when Dillon rounded up four armed men and chased Voltaire’s gamekeeper. According to one historical source (Samuel Rogers, see note 2), the Scottish philosopher had met with Voltaire no less than five or six times during his sojourn in Switzerland, so it’s possible Smith might have been present at Ferney during one or more of the events described in Madame Denis’s legal memorandum and would thus be needed as a witness.

But the most intriguing possibility is this: what if either Duke Henry or Hew Campbell Scott were out hunting with Charles Dillon when the dog-killing incident took place on the 7th? By her own account, Madame Denis reports in her legal memo that no less than five men were hunting on Voltaire’s private property. She identifies two of these men by name — the wrongdoer Charles Dillon and a local carpenter, Joseph Fillon — but that leaves three unidentified hunters. It is therefore entirely possible that the remaining members of Dillon’s Saturday-morning hunting party included one or both of Adam Smith’s pupils. Moreover, given Dillon, Duke Henry, and Hew’s aristocratic pedigrees and hunting’s widespread popularity as a pastime of the British aristocracy [see note 4], this intriguing possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Alas, we may never know which of the three possibilities described above is the true reason why Madame Denis’s legal memorandum ended up in Smith’s personal possession, but we do know this: at this very moment in time, the great Voltaire was also embroiled in a bitter scientific dispute with Dillon’s English tutor, John Turberville Needham, a leading contemporary natural philosopher and member of the prestigious Royal Society. Did the Dillon-Voltaire dispute have anything to do with the ongoing Needham-Voltaire Affair? Alain Alcouffe and I will entertain this possibility — as well as consider Adam Smith’s possible connection to the Needham-Voltaire controversy — in our next post …