Voltaire’s Tormented Soul: A Psychobiographic Inquiry (review)

François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, has had more than his fair share of biographies. Twice he attempted short, rather unsatisfactory memoirs of his life. His voluminous works plus thousands of letters, written over a period of more than 80 years, have furnished biographers, critics, and professors in several different disciplines with ample material for these works. Voltaire’s secrecy, evasions, contradictions, and downright lies have confounded biographers and led to different conclusions. He seemed to delight in mystifying his contemporaries and hence posterity. Was he born in November 1694, as his baptismal certificate indicates, or in February as he often claimed? Was his father the lawyer-notary François Arouet or was he the illegitimate son of the librettist Guérin de Rochebrune, as he liked to claim? These are two significant contradictions among many that his biographers face. Now Alexander J. Nemeth, a professional psychoanalyst with a lifelong interest in Voltaire’s period, has attempted through his discipline to give a coherent, unified account of Voltaire’s life. His approach is one that his predecessors were not equipped to employ or would not have dared use. He is careful in two appendices to explain his methodology: “Psychobiography Today” (324–25) and “Behavioral Clues as used in Depth Psychology” (326–27). Applying to Voltaire the methods practiced during his career as a forensic, clinical neuropsychologist, he sets out to penetrate the author’s subconscious and “his tormented soul,” where the contradictions of his life can be understood.

The Voltaire of many earlier biographies is present in Nemeth’s work. He gives accurate accounts of Voltaire’s exile in England, the Calas case, his quarrel with Maupertuis at the court of Frederick the Great. Nemeth is familiar with the works of the most reputable scholars— Gustave Lanson, René Pomeau, Norman L. Torrey, Ira O. Wade, Theodore Besterman, Peter J. Gay, J.H. Brumfitt, H.T. Mason—as well as the more popular works of Will and Ariel Durant, Nancy Mitford, and Jean Orieux. He acknowledges his debt to Haydn Mason, with whom he corresponded throughout the composition of this biography (13). It seems, however, that his debt is almost exclusively to works in English, even to translations of Lanson’s biography and Pomeau’s work on Voltaire’s religion. He rarely quotes Voltaire directly and, even then, not the current, critical, still unfinished Complete Works, published by the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford. This seems not to have been an obstacle. After all, he is writing in English, and he draws on insightful hints from his predecessors and goes far beyond them in presenting Voltaire.

The most daring and unexpected idea to Voltaire scholars, which is central to Nemeth’s thesis, is the importance of the early years of Voltaire’s life: his bonding with his mother, the role she must have played in his early life, and her untimely death when he was only seven years old. Her death is, for Nemeth, “easily the most traumatic experience of his entire life” (76). It has been skipped over and ignored by the biographers largely because Voltaire himself revealed almost nothing about it; she is not even mentioned in his memoirs. It is the very omission of references to his mother that becomes so significant. What is known of her suggests she must have had “a fundamental influence on his intellectual development” (326), because of the intellectuals she attracted to the household, such as Voltaire’s godfather, the worldly Abbé de Châteauneuf. Was it there that the precocious Voltaire developed and showed off the wit for which he became famous? His father is equally absent from any account of his early years, but becomes a hostile force during Voltaire’s late adolescence. The author sees a strong bond with the mother and a weak or absent father. The absence of a strong “masculine identification model” in those early years can “jeopardize sound identify formation.” Nemeth...