Of Gods and Men

Numerous are the biographical accounts of the great eighteenth-century French writer born François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), though known from the age of twenty-four by his anagrammatic nom de plume—and, often, de guerre—Voltaire. With over ten major biographies of Voltaire in French and roughly as many in English, one might think that just about everything of importance would have already been said by now. And yet, Roger Pearson—professor of French at Oxford and fellow of Queen's College—manages in this study to retrace generally established ground in lively and original ways. Imitating his biographical subject, Pearson proves above all to be an especially engaging writer, managing at almost every turn to maintain the interest of his reader through the long and winding life narrative of this deistic deity—indeed, of this "almighty" litterateur—of the French Enlightenment.

As for "freedom," the organizing theme throughout the study that is appropriately stressed in the subtitle, Voltaire did his best, it is true, to help free French subjects unjustly condemned (hardworking Protestants like the Calas and Sirven families, for example, as well as the more privileged comte de Lally and the chevalier de La Barre), but the liberty that really motivated him throughout his long life of eighty-four years was "the freedom to communicate." Words were everything to Voltaire. For such a cultured person, "music and the visual arts . . . held little interest for him." Written words were twice his ticket, as a young man, into the Bastille prison; and from his first stay of almost a year Voltaire "claimed later that his health . . . never truly recovered (over the remaining sixty years)." Besides living with various stomach ailments, Voltaire would also spend his remaining sixty years cleverly manipulating words in a continual cat-and-mouse game with French royal and ecclesiastical authorities, against whom he was always determined to have his way. Five outposts of exile away from the Parisian censors (London, Cirey, Lunéville, Berlin and Potsdam, and Geneva and Ferney), along with many shrewd publishing maneuvers in France and especially abroad, enabled Voltaire to carry out his boldest philosophical and literary strokes, to the point where both Louis xv and his inexperienced grandson Louis xvi would find themselves at a loss as how best to control this provocateur's desired freedom to write whatever he pleased. His controversial writings often pertained to Voltaire's free-thinking program of "crushing the infamous"—that is, anything in his view that smacked of "religious superstition." Thus, if words initially got Voltaire into trouble, they would eventually protect him by the accrued reputation that they earned in his behalf throughout Europe.

In the last year of his life, while a young Louis xvi was struggling to assume the new French crown, Voltaire in counterpoint was enjoying a touch of earthly paradise when he himself was quite literally crowned at the Théâtre-Français at the conclusion of Irène, his final tragedy as a long-time dramatist. He was crowned not just as a master of the written word, but also as an intellectual Olympian in the very Paris from which he had so often been banished. The ceremony included laurels and deifying verse: "No, you have no need to reach that black shore / In order to enjoy the honours of immortality." "Outside the theatre another crowd awaited: the people of Paris . . . and they shouted their approval." He was "fulfilling the role usually played by the [divinely sanctioned] monarch." Voltaire himself remained a monarchist—though he preferred the checks and balances of England's parliamentary monarchy—until his death a decade before the antecedent rumblings leading to the French Revolution, but "it was above all by his example," in championing at all costs the pursuit of literary freedom, "that he contributed to a sea-change in eighteenth-century European opinion." And Pearson is right to point to that broad contribution to literary freedom as Voltaire's greatest legacy to western modernity, rather than to the writer's sprightly philosophical tales...