11-12).
Voltaire, while himself a believer in enlightened despotism and a Deist rather than an atheist, was widely identified with this revolutionary chaos because of the immense influence his ideas had had upon the intellectual classes at the time when the French monarchy began to collapse. The very symbol of the forces standing in opposition to this revolutionary trend is Captain Vere. Vere is a humane and cultured man, but he is well aware of the necessity for order, not only in the Navy, but in the world at large, and it is this very conception or order which is threatened by the Enlightenment ideal of infinite human perfectibility, for if man is perfectible through his own efforts, what need has he for God? And if there is no need for God, then what becomes of constancy in the area of moral values or in any other area? "Vere as he is described to us," writes Charles A. Reich, "is no deranged zealot or unfeeling automation, but a very superior and very human man." Reich continues:.
Although a man of settled convictions, his objection to novel ideas was not due to moral blindness-rather because they seemed to him unsusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind (Reich, p. 68).
Along these same lines, another critic observes of Captain Vere:.
Vere's destruction by the French ship Atheiste (formally St. Louis) is, upon examination, precisely in keeping with the book's main theme. As Billy represents the "Revolutionary Spirit" in its amiable aspects, Atheiste, flying the flag of the French government, which deliberately embodied that spirit, represents conflict with form in its positively destructive aspects. (Foley, p. 163).
Thus, what is of significance in Billy Budd is not so much the work of Voltaire the thinker as the role which that work had in unleashing events to which Voltaire would personally have been opposed.