Voltaire: A Life

When Voltaire wrote histories and biographies of famous men – Charles XII, Peter the Great – he smiled all the way through, never showing the strain of research. He read everything he could and corresponded with every eyewitness possible, but he composed as if he were lecturing off the top of his witty head. Ian Davidson, on the other hand, has read – he tells and practically shows us in his new biography Voltaire: A Life – all 15,284 extant letters Voltaire wrote.

First, let’s applaud Davidson for the effort (which, to his credit, he says was a pleasure, even as he absurdly insists it is the only real way to understand Voltaire), then let’s shake him by the shoulders and ask him if keeping his nose in the 13 volumes of letters really gives us any perspective as to why Voltaire – who communicated his spirit and ideas through drama, poetry, fiction, history, and essays – was just about the greatest literary figure of the 18th century.

Born in Paris in 1694 as François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire became a writer in spite of his father’s admonitions to the contrary. On his way to becoming the most famous playwright in France, he wrote verses that mocked the French regent’s daughter, which got him exiled to the countryside for half a year. Then he wrote an anonymous poem that tweaked the regent himself, which cost him almost a year in the Bastille and, eventually, banishment from Paris.

At the height of his early fame as an author, when he faced jail or worse for threatening a duel with a nobleman, Voltaire spent two years in England soaking up the language and the culture. Davidson remarks on the incredible speed with which Voltaire picked up English. Within months, he was writing colloquial, more or less correct letters, and within 2-1/2 years he had used English to write most of the explosive book that became “Lettres Philosophiques.”

Having become a friend of Alexander Pope and an admirer of England’s comparatively enlightened religious toleration, Voltaire even considered becoming an English writer: “[H]e was captivated by the wholly foreign but seductive experience of political liberty and religious pluralism.” Voltaire returned to Paris in his early 30s, wondering how he could survive the next round of censorship or evade the next imprisonment. “I must disguise in Paris,” he noted, “what I could say in London as loud as I liked.”

Voltaire admired King Louis XIV because he had at least tried to establish a more religiously tolerant France: “He did not do everything he could have done, because he was only a man, but he did more than any other, because he was a great man,” he wrote. Davidson, however, was not as generous to Voltaire. He complains that when it comes to dealing with government officials and royalty, Voltaire did more than his share of “cringing,” “snivelling,” “groveling,” and that he frequently displayed “sycophancy” and “obsequiousness.” He puzzles over “Voltaire’s instinct to bow and scrape to despots.”

Davidson would prefer, it seems, that Voltaire had fessed up to the works he wrote that were being burned and banned, that were being used to torture young people for simply having them in their possession – an admission that would certainly have put Voltaire himself in jail or into a coffin. Voltaire was only a great man, but no martyr.

Voltaire dared to criticize and question the ruthlessness of the Catholic Church’s power and its coordination with the oppressive government of Louis XV. Armed with pen and paper, he faced a government and church that wielded the power of life and death. If Voltaire was not an action-hero, he was a hero all the same, and if had to throw a joke-bomb and run, let him run! Mankind is the better for it. Voltaire promoted tolerance as the most important tenet of civilization and mocked fanatics of all stripes. For this, of course, he was hated and reviled by the powers of his time, and even some of our own.

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