Key ideas: Published nonymously in 1721, Persian Letters address a wide range of topics: human feeling, political and social institutions, society, freedom, books, money, and more.
Don’t expect me to be capable, at present, of giving you a deep understanding of European ways and customs; I myself have only formed a vague notion of them...
The king of France is the most powerful prince in Europe. Unlike his neighbour the king of Spain, he owns no gold-mines, but he possesses greater riches than that king does; he draws these riches from the vanity of his subjects, which is more inexhaustible than mines; he has been able to undertake or support great wars with no other resources than titles and honours to sell, and by a miracle of human vanity, his troops have been paid, his strongholds provisioned, and his fleets equipped.
Furthermore, this king is a great magician: he exerts his dominion over the very minds of his subjects, for he makes them think whatever he wishes: if he has one million gold pieces in his treasury, and he needs two, he has only to persuade them that one gold piece is worth two, and they believe him.
If he has a war that is difficult to support, and he has no money, he has only to suggest to them that a piece of paper is money, and they are convinced upon the spot; he even goes so far as to make them believe that he can cure them of all kinds of ills simply by touching them, so great is the strength, and the power, that he exerts over their minds.
Let me say it to the shame of men: the law forbids our princes to use wine, and they drink it to such excess as to make them less than human. Christian princes, on the other hand, are allowed wine, and it does not appear to lead them into evil ways.
The human spirit is the essence of contradiction: by indulging in extreme debauchery, a man rebels against prohibitions, and the law designed to make us behave more justly frequently achieves nothing but the contrary result. [...]
Orientals have been wise enough to seek remedies for melancholy as assiduously as they have sought remedies for the most angerous illnesses. When a European suffers some misfortune, his only resource is to read a philosopher called Seneca;
Nothing is as distressing as words of solace that invoke the inevitability of pain, the futility of remedies, the fatality of destiny, the determinations of providence, and the misery of the human condition; it is a mockery to attempt to alleviate suffering with the thought that we are born wretched; it is far better to banish those thoughts from the mind, and treat man as a sentient, not a rational, being.
I am sending you a copy of a letter which arrived here from a Frenchman living in Spain: I believe you’ll be delighted with it:
‘I have been travelling for the last six months in Spain and Portugal, and living among people who, while they despise everyone else, pay no one but the French the compliment of loathing them.
‘The striking characteristic of both nations is gravity, which reveals itself principally in two ways: by spectacles, and by moustaches. [...]
‘They have their little courteous ways which in France would seem inappropriate; for example, a captain never flogs his soldier without asking his permission, and the Inquisition never condemns a Jew to be burnt at the stake without apologizing to him.
‘Spaniards who are not burnt at the stake seem to be so fond of the Inquisition, that it would seem peevish to deprive them of it; I only wish that another Inquisition could be established, not against heretics, but against heresiarchs, who attribute the same efficacy to trivial monastic practices as they do to the seven sacraments, who worship everything they venerate, and are so pious that they are barely Christians.
‘You can find wit and common sense among Spaniards, but do not seek these in their books; take a look at a Spaniard’s library: one half novels, and the other half works of scholasticism; you’d say that the parts had been chosen and the whole thing put together by some secret enemy of human reason.
‘The only one of their books that is good, is the one that makes fun of all the others.
It would not grieve me, Usbek, to see a letter written to Madrid by a Spaniard who was traveling in France : I think he would have little difficulty in avenging his nation. What a grand opportunity for an even-tempered, thoughtful man ! I imagine he would begin his description of Paris in this way:
There is a house here in which they place mad people one would at first expect it to be the largest in the city; but no, the remedy is much too insignificant for the disease. Without doubt, the French, being held in very slight esteem by their neighbors, shut up some madmen in this house, to create the impression that those who are at large are sane.
Not all the nations of Europe are equally submissive to the control of their prince; for example, the impatient temper of the English rarely leaves their king time to make his authority felt: submission and obedience are the virtues on which the English pride themselves the least.
But if a prince, instead of making the lives of his subjects happy, attempts to oppress and ruin them, the basis of obedience is destroyed ; nothing binds them, nothing attaches them to him ; and they return to their natural liberty. They maintain that all unlimited power must be unlawful, because it cannot have had a lawful origin. For, we cannot, say they, give to another more power over us than we ourselves have: now, we have not unlimited power over ourselves; for example, we have no right to take our own lives: no one upon earth then, they conclude, has such a power.
There’s a type of book which we do not have in Persia, and which I find is very fashionable here; I refer to the periodical.
These publications pamper laziness; the indolent are overjoyed to be able to skim thirty volumes in a quarter of an hour.
With the average book, the reader has barely read past the author’s usual prefatory compliments than he begins to feel desperate; he is obliged to half drown in a sea of words before he arrives at the subject matter.[...]
I do not know where the merit lies in writing such works; that is precisely what I would do, if I wished to ruin my health, and my bookseller.
The great mistake made by the writers of periodicals is that they write only about new books, as if the truth were ever new. It seems to me that until a man has read all the ancient books he has no reason to prefer the new ones to them.
But, when they make it a rule to discuss only works that are hot off the press, they also make themselves another rule, which is to be very boring. They are careful not to criticize the books from which the extracts are taken, however good their reasons for doing so; and indeed, what man is bold enough to want to make himself ten or twelve enemies every month?
Nothing is more attractive to foreigners than liberty and affluence, freedom’s invariable companion; the first is sought for its own sake, while deprivation draws people to those countries where affluence reigns. [...]
Humans are like plants, which never prosper if they are not properly cultivated; among the poor our species loses ground, and sometimes actually degenerates.
For our next interview my learned friend took me into a separate room. ‘We have books on modern history here,’ he said; ‘beginning with works on the church and the popes; I read these for edification, but they often have the opposite effect on me.
‘Over there are the historians who describe the decadence of the redoubtable Roman Empire, formed from the debris of so many monarchies, and upon whose demise so many new monarchies sprang up. A numberless horde of barbarians, as alien as the countries they inhabited, suddenly spread across the land like flood-water, ravaging and dismembering the empire, and founding all those kingdoms that you see in the Europe of today.
Those people were not, strictly speaking, barbarians, since they were free, but that is what they became when, submitting for the most part to absolute power, they lost that sweet freedom which accords so well with reason, with humanity, and with nature.
[ This letter tells the story of the Scotch financier John Law as an allegory on his attempts to support the value of paper assets by placing strict controls on the circulation of gold, silver, and precious metals.
Some days ago I met in a country-house which I was visiting, two learned men who have a great reputation here. Their characters astonished me.
The conversation of the first, justly estimated, reduced itself to this: What I have said is true, because I have said it.
The conversation of the second went the other way about : What I have not said is not true, because I have not said it.
I liked the first pretty well; for it is not of the least consequence to me, however stiff in opinion a man may be; but I cannot endure impertinence.
The first defends his opinions; that is to say, his own property; the second attacks the opinions of others; that is to say, the property of the whole world.
Oh, my dear Rica, how badly vanity serves those who have a larger share of it than is necessary for self-preservation! Such people wish to be admired by dint of offending. They wish to be superior, but they do not even attain to mediocrity.