Voltaire & Voltaire & Voltaire

The French author and philosopher Voltaire was one of the main representatives of the French enlightenment, stubborn, intelligent, rebellious and ambitious. He was as much against the establishment of church and state as he was keen to be considered highly by the aristocracy of the times. His authorship was originally primarily focused on the theatre, with tragedies in the most classical sense. But his main influence resided in two literary innovations.

I read several of his books earlier this years, including his "Dictionnaire Philosophique", and many of his letters.

 Voltaire - Lettres Philosophiques (Flammarion, 1964)

The first one were his Lettres Philosophiques, a new approach of commenting on life and society without actually writing a philosophical essay, but rather easy to read comments on what was happening in reality. His exile in England allowed him to comment on the benefits of many aspects of the way the English state was organised, and implicitly comparing this to what was happening in France. He published his Lettres Philosophiques when returning from his exile, but the book was immediately forbidden and even burned on the stairs of the French parliament. In his Lettres, he praises the tolerance in England, the acceptance of different ethnicities and especially religions next to each other without repression. He also hailed the formal accounting the government had to show for the parliament.

Voltaire - Micromégas/Zadig/Candide (Flammarion, 2006)

His later political and philosophical novels were equally a literary innovation. He uses a kind of "what if" approach, putting his main characters in a surreal environment so that he could comment on societal mishaps and philosophical or scientific insights. Micromégas offers a kind of science fiction account of a huge space traveller (37 km tall!) who eventually come to our earth, where he and his friends get a laughing fit because of the stupidity and arrogance of mankind and its religions. In Candide, the main character is a naive young man who comes in a whole series of unpleasant situations, allowing Voltaire to test whether we really live in the "best of all possible worlds", as Leibniz pretended. Obviously, Voltaire makes a charicature of the German philosopher and his thinking.

Voltaire - Traité Sur La Tolérance (Gallimard, 2016)

In his "Treatise on Tolerance" he attacks the church and the justice system after the execution of Jean Calas, who allegedly had killed his son who wanted to convert to catholicism. Voltaire attacks the total inequality in the justice system, the torture, the manipulation of evidence, the influence of the church in judicial verdicts.

It is hard for us to understand the efforts that Voltaire made, including the writing of hundreds of letters to restore the honour of people he never even met, with the sole purpose of changing the justice system

In today's world, these books are still relevant. Whether in Iran, the United States, Russia, Israel, Syria and many other countries, Voltaire and his thoughts and actions are still needed. Stephen Pinker is advocating for "Enlightenment Now", and it's more than high time that the voices of obscurantism are overpowered again by the voice of reason.

What Voltaire means in today's world, cannot be overstated.

David Bodanis - Passionate Minds - The Great Enlightenment Love Affair (Little, Brown, 2006)

One more biography on the life that Voltaire and Emilie du Châtelet had together at the castle of Cirey. Bodanis is more interested in the story of the two figureheads of the French enlightenment than he is in their thoughts and new insights.

Nevertheless, it's insightful, interesting and funny at times, and for a biography, also easy to read. With two characters such as Voltaire and Emilie, not much can go wrong in the description of their lives. They did so much and meant so much for later generations that is almost seems like a feat to describe their lives in 230 pages.

Judith P. Zinsser - Emilie du Châtelet, Daring Genius Of The Enlightenment (Penguin, 2006)

In my Voltaire year, I also read this fascinating biography of an even more fascinating woman, Emilie du Châtelet, an 18th Century mathematician and scientist who was the mistress of Voltaire for many years. She was of very high nobility, yet never really fit in. She was more interested in science and mathematics than in the shallow life at the salons of the King and Queen. After her third child was born, she moved to the castle of Cirey in the Champagne region where she lived with Voltaire, and with the blessing of her husband. Together, they translated Newton into French, wrote books about physics, the nature of fire.

They organise evenings at the castle for other influential thinkers. Du Châtelet fought her entire life against the prejudices of the male world against women, and showed both by her knowledge, her insights and her character that the actual opposite was true.

Maybe a little less known, is her influence of the scientific approach, and the strong importance she gave to the role of hypotheses as the foundation of building up evidence and counter-evidence. Despite her great interest and admiration for people like Newton and Leibniz, she still challenged some of their thoughts and argued against some of their conclusions.

For her and for Voltaire the entire world was opening up. Stories about new territories, other cultures, about the forces of the universe, about the orbits of planets, about the possibilities of the microscope and even the invention of inoculation of children to prevent diseases created a new world of vast opportunities that suddenly broke the narrow and oppressive confines of religion and state.

Both she and Voltaire did everything they could to open this new found crack in this narrow world as wide as possible. Du Chatelet also published a book on happiness, including some for that time shocking disclosures on the importance of pleasure, and a book enumerating all the completely irrational things in the Bible, demonstrating that scripture is made by men, and then men with limited possibilities of coherence and logic.

Zinsser's book gives a wonderful description of the complexities of this budding of rationality in a still very obscure society.

Ian Davidson - Voltaire - A Life (Profile Books, 2012) ****

Voltaire is one of those amazing figures in literature and enlightenment. Even if he started as an author of theater, he soon became a leading political voice in France in the eighteenth century, advocating for more democracy, justice, science and less church. He wrote around 20,000 letters in his life, and many of those were the source material for Davidson to write this magnificent biography. We not only get insights in the author's opinions, but also about his ongoing battles with the establishment, his incarceration and exile, his turbulent love life with Emilie de Chatelet, his scam to win the Paris lottery which made him extremely rich. A man with opinions on everything and everyone, but at the same time willing to suffer the consequences of his opinions.

The book is quite heavy, with close to 500 pages of relatively small print, and many letter excerpts, yet Voltaire's thinking and life seem to come back to life in Davidson's extremely well-documented text. That is of course largely due to Voltaire's own unusual life, but also to Davidson's skills.