French German
This Voltaire passage appears to be one of the earliest philosophical critiques of meat-eating in European Enlightenment literature.
Within this essay, section XV (Roman numeral 15) is titled "Du mal, et en premier lieu de la destruction des bêtes". This section deals with animal suffering and killing animals for food.
Maybe I am wrong to call this essay obscure, but it took some searching to track down the original French version in a scanned book. The essay seems to appear in some late collected editions of Voltaire’s philosophical works, especially those based on the edition by Adrien‑Jean‑Quentin Beuchot.
I found the original French text in the Garnier (Paris) edition volume 28 from 1879, titled "Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire : avec notices, préfaces, variantes, table analytique, les notes de tous les commentateurs et des notes nouvelles, conforme pour le texte à l'édition de Beuchot, enrichie des découvertes les plus récentes et mise au courant des travaux qui ont paru jusqu'à ce jour" (pages 534/535).
A footnote in this 1879 French edition (page 517) says: "In his last manuscript, the author had corrected the title [i.e., "Il faut prendre un parti, ou le principe d'action. Diatribe"] as follows: Il faut prendre un parti, ou du principe d'action et de l'éternité des choses, par l'abbé de Tilladet. [One Must Take a Side, or On the Principle of Action and the Eternity of Things, by the Abbé de Tilladet.] Voltaire himself, in paragraph XVI, dates this work August 1772."
English translation (1912)
I also found an official English translation from 1912 (archive.org; gutenberg.org) by Joseph McCabe: "Toleration and other essays", G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, The Knickerbocker Press, 1912 (pages 229-231).
Below you can see the English translation from 1912. For the words highlighted in yellow, please see the comments on the translation at the end.
"
[...]
WE MUST TAKE SIDES; Or, the Principle of Action
[...]
xvOF EVIL AND, IN THE FIRST PLACE, THE DESTRUCTION OF BEASTS
We have never had any idea of good and evil, save in relation to ourselves. The sufferings of an animal seem to us evils, because, being animals ourselves, we feel that we should excite compassion if the same were done to us. We should have the same feeling for a tree if we were told that it suffered torment when it was cut ; and for a stone if we learned that it suffers when it is dressed. But we should pity the tree and the stone much less than the animal, because they are less like us. Indeed, we soon cease to be touched by the awful destiny of the beasts that are intended for our table. Children who weep at the death of the first chicken they see killed laugh at the death of the second.
It is only too sure that the disgusting carnage of our butcheries and kitchens does not seem to us an evil. On the contrary, we regard this horror, pestilential as it often is, as a blessing of the Lord ; and we still have prayers in which we thank him for these murders. Yet what can be more abominable than to feed constantly on corpses?
Not only do we spend our lives in killing, and devouring what we have killed, but all the animals slaughter each other ; they are impelled to do so by an invincible instinct. From the smallest insects to the rhinoceros and the elephant, the earth is but a vast battle-field, a world of carnage and destruction. There is no animal that has not its prey, and that, to capture it, does not employ some means equivalent to the ruse and rage with which the detestable spider entraps and devours the innocent fly. A flock of sheep devours in an hour, as it crops the grass, more insects than there are men on the earth.
What is still more cruel is that in this horrible scene of reiterated murder we perceive an evident design to perpetuate all species by means of the bloody corpses of their mutual enemies. The victims do not expire until nature has carefully provided for new representatives of the species. Everything is born again to be murdered.
Yet I observe no moralist among us, nor any of our fluent preachers or boasters, who has ever reflected in the least on this frightful habit, which has become part of our nature. We have to go back to the pious Porphyry and the sympathetic Pythagoreans to find those who would shame us for our bloody gluttony ; or we must travel to the land of the Brahmans. Our monks, the caprice of whose founders has bade them renounce the flesh, are murderers of soles and turbots, if not of partridges and quails. Neither among the monks, nor in the Council of Trent, nor in the assemblies of the clergy, nor in our academies, has this universal butchery ever been pronounced an evil. There has been no more thought given to it in the councils of the clergy than in our public-houses.
Hence the great being is justified of these butcheries in our eyes ; or, indeed, we are his accomplices.
[...]
"
Comments on the 1912 English translation
The translation is generally very good.
However,
- instead of "they are impelled to do so by an invincible instinct" the original French says "ils y sont portés par un attrait invincible": they are driven to it by an irresistible attraction.
- instead of "a vast battle-field, a world of carnage and destruction" the original French says "un vaste champ de guerres, d’embûches, de carnage": a vast field of wars, ambushes, carnage.
- instead of "boasters" the original French says "aucun même de nos tartufes": not even one of our religious hypocrites.
