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cahnWe haven't had a new post since before December 25, so obligatory Yuletide link to this hilarious story of Frederick the Great babysitting his bratty little brother, with bonus Fritz/Fredersdorf!
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Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-16 06:58 am (UTC)Anyway, I thought I should read Micromegas, and I'm glad I did because it is hilarious! I read the Gutenberg translation, which is great because it's got footnotes as well. It's very short (it's basically a short story) and easy to read. The introduction says that it is in imitation of Gulliver's Travels, and also mentions that "Abbot Trublet, in his Biography of Fontenelle, does not hesitate to say that Micromegas is directed against Fontenelle [secretary of the Academy of Sciences for 42 years]," but is not sure about the date of publication so cannot say. Wikipedia seems to think that the date of publication is indeed 1752, though potentially as early as 1739.
The eponymous Micromegas is an inhabitant of a planet orbiting Sirius, and is extremely tall (120,000 ft). (Voltaire calculates how large he thinks the planet must be from simple proportions, but I suppose that he hadn't read all of Emilie's notes on Newton, because he doesn't ever talk about gravitation or anything like that... okay, that's me being snarky. :P ) He meets natives of Saturn, who are only 6,000 ft tall, and has to adjust his thought processes due to them being so small.
He built a strong friendship with the secretary of the academy of Saturn, a spirited man who had not invented anything, to tell the truth, but who understood the inventions of others very well, and who wrote some passable verses and carried out some complicated calculations. (I assume this is a dig at Fontenelle!)
Anyway, Micromegas and "the dwarf from Saturn" travel around together and eventually end up at Earth. Apparently Voltaire is required to make a dig at That Guy every time he writes something, and here it is: He [the 'dwarf from Saturn'] had to make twelve steps each time the other [Micromegas] took a stride; imagine (if it is all right to make such a comparison) a very small lapdog following a captain of the guards of the Prussian king. (I laughed! I assume he's making a dig at the Potsdam Giants there, even though obviously the timing's wrong, as he did in Candide, iirc.) The two friends are too large for anything human to impinge on their senses at first, but eventually they come across a boatful of humans: We know that a flock of philosophers was at this time returning from the Arctic Circle, where they had made some observations, which no one had dared make up to then. The gazettes claimed that their vessel ran aground on the coast of Bothnia, and that they were having a lot of difficulty setting things straight; but the world never shows its cards. I am going to tell how it really happened, artlessly and without bias; which is no small thing for an historian.
I laughed at this too, of course! Poor Maupertuis, he is doomed to be satirized. I can't find anything about the Maupertuis expedition running aground on the coast of Bothnia specifically, but a cursory Google search brings upthis source saying "the ship turned out to have a leak, and it had to be stranded on the Swedish coast after a few days"; there is also this source, which says De Maupertuis first planned to carry out the measurements in the archipelago of the Gulf of Bothnia. He found out, however, that the islands were too low for triangular measurement. It would absolutely be 100% on-brand for Voltaire to conflate "we had a leak for a few days" plus "also, we determined we couldn't actually do the measurements in this other place after spending a little while there" to "vessel ran aground in this place and they had a lot of difficulty setting things straight" for the sake of maximum trollery. (Also, note that the expedition left in 1736 and got back in 1737, which is why I think this was drafted in the late 1730's!)
Anyway, Micromegas and the dwarf from Saturn figure out that the boat contains people who can communicate, and they figure out a way to communicate. The humans measure the aliens (Our philosophers planted a great shaft on him [he is lying down; this is presumably to do a trig calculation], in a place that doctor Swift would have named, but that I will restrain myself from calling by its name, out of respect for the ladies) and start having a conversation. Did you know, for example, that as I am speaking with you, there are 100,000 madmen of our species wearing hats, killing 100,000 other animals wearing turbans, or being massacred by them, and that we have used almost surface of the Earth for this purpose since time immemorial?" The footnote says that he is referring to the Turk/Russian war of 1736-1739. (Why was Voltaire against that one and for Catherine beating up the Greeks later? It appears from the conversation in the text because he thought the former was about land, while you told me in salon that he thought Catherine's sally would be about human rights?)
Conversation with the philosphes:
"Since you are amongst the small number of wise men," he [Micromegas] told these sirs [the philosophers aboard the ship], "and since apparently you do not kill anyone for money, tell me, I beg of you, what occupies your time."
"We dissect flies," said the philosopher, "we measure lines, we gather figures; we agree with each other on two or three points that we do not understand."
At the end of this conversation and of the story, they have a conversation about the soul. Various philosophies (Leibnitz, Locke) are put forth, and the last is Aquinas: all the universe was made for mankind. The aliens, of course, think this is preposterous (as clearly does Voltaire), and the book ends by Micromegas promising to make them a beautiful book in which they will see the point of everything.
Indeed, he gave them this book before leaving. It was taken to the academy of science in Paris, but when the ancient secretary opened it, he saw nothing but blank pages. "Ah!" he said, "I suspected as much."
(The "ancient secretary," the footnote says, is Fontenelle.)
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-17 01:41 am (UTC)So I've been reading Too Like the Lightning (which I'll post about when I'm done -- it is a book that is interesting to read having gone through salon, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it to salon).
I tried it, because it sounds interesting on paper, I like the author's blog, and I even read the non-fiction book she turned her dissertation into (dry but informative). And a few pages into the Kindle sample, I just Could Not, and I doubt I'll ever try again. (Never say never, but...)
Wikipedia seems to think that the date of publication is indeed 1752, though potentially as early as 1739.
Chronology note: 1752, Voltaire is living with Fritz, 1739, Voltaire has met Fritz a couple years ago. Either way, Prussians captains of the guards appearing in his fic don't surprise me!
a very small lapdog following a captain of the guards of the Prussian king. (I laughed! I assume he's making a dig at the Potsdam Giants there, even though obviously the timing's wrong, as he did in Candide, iirc.)
Maybe, but the small lapdog makes me think of Fritz. Fritz had tall soldiers and height requirements in his army too! He just didn't keep a regiment specifically to concentrate all the tallest men in Europe. But yeah, Voltaire likes to make his digs at FW (who doesn't?) (Besides Stratemann.)
Why was Voltaire against that one and for Catherine beating up the Greeks later? It appears from the conversation in the text because he thought the former was about land, while you told me in salon that he thought Catherine's sally would be about human rights?
You're asking for consistency? :P I think he was getting romantic about his enlightened protege Catherine freeing the Greeks, the way maaaany Europeans would get romantic about the Greek revolution when it finally happened. [Selena will no doubt insert an aside about Byron here.]
I mean, he was Islamophobic, but if you ask me, he was thinking emotionally about the thought of "liberating" Athens, and then rationalizing backwards from there.
He also designed a war chariot to help fight Fritz in the Seven Years' War; he saw the folly and evil of war, but he was by no means a pacifist.
I can't find anything about the Maupertuis expedition running aground on the coast of Bothnia specifically, but a cursory Google search brings upthis source saying "the ship turned out to have a leak, and it had to be stranded on the Swedish coast after a few days";
Well, most of the coast of Sweden is on the coast of Bothnia, especially in our period when Finland is part of Sweden. So if they ran aground on the coast of Sweden, there's probably at least a 50% chance it was off the coast of Bothnia. (Measuring coastlines notoriously gets into fractals, so I'm not going to attempt it. :P I kid, I could google it, but eh.)
there is also this source, which says De Maupertuis first planned to carry out the measurements in the archipelago of the Gulf of Bothnia. He found out, however, that the islands were too low for triangular measurement.
This is in Terrall's (drrryyyy!) bio of Maupertuis::
Only after journeying from Stockholm to Torneå, at the very north ofthe gulf,did they see that the islands along the western shore, although numerous,were too low to be visible at a distance, and hence useless as triangulation points. After exploring the islands near the eastern shore and finding things no better there, they considered the alternatives.
Terrall continues:
Celsius, the only Scandinavian among them, favored waiting for winter and measuring the wholelength of thedegree directly on the frozen suiface ofthe gulf, without bothering with a chain of triangles. (One degree of latitude corresponds to about sixty miles.) This would have meant a much longer and more physically demanding baseline measurement,but would have avoided the inevitable complications of measuring and reducing a whole series of angles. It would also have meant waiting for winter for the dark night sky necessary for the stellar observations that would define the endpoints. The French did not want to put off their operations, however; nor did they trust the ice in the gulf.
Personally, I'm always suspicious when Europeans go to polar regions and don't listen to the locals. :P It's an endemic problem, and part of the reason Amundsen is my fave is that he managed to actually the Inuit seriously and listen to them!
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-17 11:52 am (UTC)I have been on those islands and I can well believe it. The islands are VERY low and the sea between them is VERY shallow. They are also newly risen from the sea, since Sweden is still rebounding from the Ice Age.
part of the reason Amundsen is my fave is that he managed to actually the Inuit seriously and listen to them!
I had a polar explorer phase and I too like Amundsen! But Nansen is my favorite. Like, he not only crossed Greenland on skis and was on the Fram expedition, he ALSO did a groundbreaking Ph D i neuroscience, did research in oceanography, was part of the peaceful dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway, and worked for the rights of war refugees after WWI. Also, just look at him, he was such a badass.
Er, sorry for the tangent, but you started it!
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-17 02:55 pm (UTC)In general, I went through a South Pole expedition obsession, but am very weak on the North Pole. For the same reason I'm all "1764-1772 foreign policy in excruciating detail!" and "17th century Stuarts are not my period." My brain likes to go very deep in particular areas and ignore adjacent areas.
* Or not. I understand that he's a superior human being, but, uh, well, look at who my favorite historical figure of all time is (Fritz). Sometimes "superior human being" is not the criterion by which I judge. :P
Er, sorry for the tangent, but you started it!
Lol, tangents are what we do here!
Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-17 05:58 pm (UTC)The exception is the Swedish book Expeditionen: en kärlekshistoria by Bea Uusma (in English as The Expedition. I'll C&P from an old DW entry of mine...
Bea Uusma is a fandom-of-one for the Andrée polar expedition. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of how the expedition members died, going through various theories and doing original research. The book is also enjoyable for showing her own fannish reactions--from what I remember, she became a physician partly because she wanted to solve this mystery!
So, this expedition is pretty ridiculous. Compared to capable polar explorers like Amundsen and Nansen, Andrée is an engineer with no previous polar experience. He takes along two other engineers and plans to fly across the Arctic in a balloon at a time when no balloon has been in the air more than 24 hours. Andrée calculates that their balloon will be able to fly for 30 days. They do not even test-fly it. It lasts for 65 hours before it goes down on the ice. The three men travel across the ice on sleds that they brought along as reserve equipment. The sleds are very heavy, as they bring along ridiculous things like encyclopedias. Their bodies and the sleds are found on a tiny Arctic island in 1930, and theories about their deaths range from trichinosis to lead-poisoning to freezing to death. Uusma finds none of these believable and constructs her own theory.
Her theory, based on how/where the skeletons were lying and information from their clothes, was that a polar bear attacked them and killed one of them (he was later buried by the others) and wounded another. The wounded man was put in his sleeping bag in the tent, where he later died. The third man died sitting outside the tent with a morphine bottle within reach, and Uusma thinks he committed suicide.
Re: Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-17 06:12 pm (UTC)Wow! I can see why, it seems fascinating.
Compared to capable polar explorers like Amundsen and Nansen
Unfortunately, none of this sounds much worse than Amundsen discovering he needs a plane to take him over the North Pole NOW, before anyone else beats him there. All his attention to detail goes out the window and he's like, "Plane experts? We don't need no stinkin' plane experts!" The whole expedition was so mismanaged it's a miracle he survived it, and not a surprise he didn't survive a subsequent attempt to fly over the Arctic in a plane (admittedly, search-and-rescue missions are by their nature rushed, but nothing about his previous cavalier attitude toward planes is inconsistent with him finally dying in a plane).
It's a bit like Fritz and the War of the Bavarian Succession: times move on, old man does not live up to previous standard. :P
Also, this conversation is reminding me of the 17th century Swedish Vasa ship, which sank after sailing just 1300 meters and is now in a museum that was built just to house this ship (I assume you've been there?). I learned about it at *work*, of all places, because it was used in a conference talk, I think, illustrating the dangers of poor engineering design and how if you're a software developer, you really need to learn the lessons that that failure has to teach.
Re: Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-17 06:42 pm (UTC)It's a bit like Fritz and the War of the Bavarian Succession: times move on, old man does not live up to previous standard. :P
Heh, seems like it.
I have been to the Vasa museum, yes, but it was before my current fannish period, or I would no doubt have paid much more attention! Perhaps I'll visit it again some time. I did visit the Götheborg III this summer, though.
Re: Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-18 01:59 am (UTC)Yeah, those were much greater accomplishments on his part, but you still have to watch out, because he's a great spin doctor and skips right over his most major mistakes, at least on the South Pole expedition (I know less about the Northwest Passage one).
Re: Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-18 09:11 am (UTC)(By the way, it's obvious that there is somewhere a polar exploration fandom which has pet names for pairings, and who fill each other's requests for Yuletide etc. It's kind of weird to see those fics from outside, because they've obviously developed a lot of fanon around it.)
Re: Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-19 02:51 pm (UTC)Re: Polar explorers
Date: 2024-01-19 04:14 pm (UTC)Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 06:11 am (UTC)Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 06:10 am (UTC)Oh right, we had this discussion with Candide too! I had only forgotten what you said and just remembered that there were tall soldiers in Candide :) (But I did mean to say he was taking a jibe at Fritz, just was thinking it might be by way of FW as well, why not get two Hohenzollern for the price of one!)
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-17 08:00 am (UTC)the narrator of TLtL calls perhaps the first science-fiction story.
Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a satirical novel about the main character attempting to visit the moon which I haven't read but which I knew about, and wiki tells me is inspired by Lucian, and also published in 1657, i.e. definitely predating Voltaire by two generations at least.
Why was Voltaire against that one and for Catherine beating up the Greeks later? It appears from the conversation in the text because he thought the former was about land, while you told me in salon that he thought Catherine's sally would be about human rights?
What Mildred said, and also, yes, the Turk/Russian war of 1736 - 1739 features a Russia ruled by a very unenlightened autocrat and Voltaire sees it being solely about a land grab, i.e. whoever wins, the people exchange just one tyrant for another, whereas Catherine later in his rationalisation is enlightened and will free the Greeks from Ottoman tyranny and will bring back freedom back to Greece.
The European enthusiasm for the Greek War of Independence decades later, btw, was also a weird illustration of how many projected themselves onto the idea of Ancient Greece as the source of European civilisation while being angry and sneering at the present day Greeks for not fitting with their idea of how the descendants of Pericles and Leonidas should be like once non-Greek volunteers got there. (Not Byron himself, though, not least because as a young man on the Grand Tour, he'd actually been to Greece before joining the Independence War years later, so he knew the country and the people.) If you read travelogues (again, not Byron's) in prose or verse from the first two decades of the 19th century, there is a lot of anti-Greek bias, and Greek interpreters or tradespeople show up as cowardly and treacherous, especially in accounts written by English folk, with the not so subtext that the TRUE heirs of ancient Greece are, of course, you guessed it. And post War of Independence you get that attitude by other Europeans, especially the Germans, as well. (Shadows of this show up periodically even now when the Brits have to justify keeping the Elgin marbles.)
Now Voltaire obviously never visited Greece, but I think if he had, given that quote about how awful it is to think of the Muslims disgracing the tombs of *insert heroes of Ancient Greece* etc., is that the actual Greeks were deeply and intensely religious and far more imprinted and relating to their Byzantine past than to the pre Christian one. At that point, and not only then. I remember visiting the Athens Book Fair in the year where everyone was talking about the upcoming visit of the Pope (the first by a Pope to Greece), and would he apologize for the sacking of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204. Constantinople and the Byzantine era was the big, big topic and identification point. Since Voltaire's beef was with very strictly organized religion in general, God knows what he would have made of the Greek Orthodox Church. (Or the Russian one, but he never encountered that one in practice, either.)
1739 vs 1752 - if that's the debated year of publication, do we have a likely year of origin? I mean, given how long it took for the Pucelle to get officially printed for censorship reasons, I can believe there are decades in between, but if 1739 is possible, I take it there are reasons to believe (as in, maybe references in his letters?) that Voltaire wrote it in the later 1730s?
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 06:19 am (UTC)Oh oof. I can totally see this, and... ugh.
1739 vs 1752 - if that's the debated year of publication, do we have a likely year of origin? I mean, given how long it took for the Pucelle to get officially printed for censorship reasons, I can believe there are decades in between, but if 1739 is possible, I take it there are reasons to believe (as in, maybe references in his letters?) that Voltaire wrote it in the later 1730s?
At least according to Wikipedia, there is no real known year of origin (there are scholars who debate it). I was just thinking that it seems odd to me that Maupertuis' expedition would have been referenced so centrally if it had been written more than ten years later, but that's nothing as convincing as a textual reason like a letter reference. In the wikipedia article there's a link to an article which I believe is summarizing the arguments, but I can't easily read it without paying.
ETA: The Gutenberg edition says, "Voltaire's lengthy correspondences do not contain anything that might indicate the period in which Micromegas was published. The engraved title of the edition that I believe to be the original displays no date."
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 06:27 am (UTC)ETA: Or there's my tried-and-true "send to Selena" approach. ;) It's only about 30 pages total. Selena, let me know if you want them.
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 07:29 am (UTC)Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 10:51 pm (UTC)What Mildred said, and also, yes, the Turk/Russian war of 1736 - 1739 features a Russia ruled by a very unenlightened autocrat and Voltaire sees it being solely about a land grab, i.e. whoever wins, the people exchange just one tyrant for another
My current plan is to cover the 1730s next time I feel the urge to study foreign policy, so hopefully we can learn about this war sometime in 2024!
Thank you for the additional Byron context! I knew just enough to prompt you. :)
there is a lot of anti-Greek bias, and Greek interpreters or tradespeople show up as cowardly and treacherous, especially in accounts written by English folk, with the not so subtext that the TRUE heirs of ancient Greece are, of course, you guessed it.
Haha, exactly like Orlov.
(I had a response here on the 1739 vs. 1752 question, but Cahn has already responded.)
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-17 11:53 am (UTC)Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 06:20 am (UTC)Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-18 09:07 am (UTC)Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-19 12:46 am (UTC)I think that's part of the point, to be unsure? But I'm also not sure about that.
Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-19 12:48 am (UTC)