Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom
by Roger Pearson
448pp, Bloomsbury, £18.99
Famous in his lifetime as a prolific dramatist and a poet, Voltaire is not much read nowadays, even in France, and then only for his short prose tales such as Candide. Instead, he embodies in his career and makes intelligible in his conversation and letters the great revolutions of the 18th century in religion, civil rights, finance, domesticity and sex. As Roger Pearson shows in this elegant, learned and handsome new biography, Voltaire managed both to be in the thick of things and to survey them from the sort of Olympian distance that generally only posterity enjoys.
Pearson, professor of French at Oxford, presents the ancien régime as a sort of obstacle-course of court procedure, ecclesiastical susceptibility, aristocratic bullying, press censorship and diplomatic rivalry through which Voltaire managed sometimes to burst, sometimes to slip. The prizes were fame and money, the penalties prison, exile, caning, death and ridicule.
Voltaire was not a good man in the sense that David Hume was a good man - but then all Hume had to bother with, in the historic home of liberty, was Dr Johnson and a few Kirk ministers.
Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694. Depending on his mood in later life, he was the son of a notary or of a nobleman with a taste for writing popular songs. He was sent to the Jesuit school of Louis-le-Grand where he learned both his habits of industry and, very probably, his love of the theatre. Even then François was, according to his father confessor, "devoured by a thirst for celebrity".
To please his notary father, he studied the law while composing, at the age of 17, his first tragedy, Oedipe. In 1717 he was imprisoned in the Bastille for writing satirical verses about the regent, Philippe of Orleans. He was released 11 months later. Oedipe was performed at the Comedie française in 1718 and brought François fame and also money, which he multiplied in the financial bubbles of that period. By now, he was calling himself Voltaire. On balance, Pearson believes the name is an anagram of arouet l[e] j[eune], the U transformed under the conventions of Latin epigraphy to a V and the J to an I.
His pleasant life was interrupted in 1725 when he was beaten up by thugs hired by an aristocratic bully-boy, the Chevalier de Rohan. When Voltaire tried to fight the man, he was sent anew to the Bastille. He then chose to lie low in England. According to Pearson, English "liberties" such as constitutional government, the rule of law, relatively free commerce, some religious toleration and freedom of the press were a revelation.
In the Lettres philosophiques sur les anglais, printed in 1734 after his return to Paris, France suffered by comparison and Voltaire was again in trouble with church and court. In what was to become the pattern of his later life, he took refuge with a woman in frontier country, this time in Champagne with Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise de Châtelet and a former mistress of Voltaire's friend, the Duc de Richelieu.
With Emilie's husband away much of the time with the army, Voltaire repaired and extended the Châtelet château at Cirey. The couple spent 16 years there, with excursions to the courts of Versailles or Lunéville in Lorraine, or to bolt-holes in the Low Countries, entertaining, quarrelling, conducting scientific experiments and, in Voltaire's case, churning out plays and pamphlets. Emilie worked on translations of Newton's Principia. Emilie, who seemed adept even for her class and that era in managing friends and lovers, in the end became pregnant by the Marquis de Saint-Lambert and died in childbirth in 1749.
Pearson's long section on Cirey has something of the louche and raffish air of Nancy Mitford's insufferable Voltaire in Love (1957). Once again, Emilie is bossy, domineering and promiscuous. There is a certain amount of interior decoration, but not a quotation from her scientific writings. Her husband is again a figure of fun.
When Emilie died, Voltaire found she had removed his portrait from her locket and replaced it with that of Saint-Lambert. "That's women for you," he shrugged. "I removed Richelieu from that ring, and Saint-Lambert expelled me. One nail to drive out another. Such is the way of the world." He himself was having an affair with his widowed niece, Marie-Louise Denis, his "one and only hope in this life". At times, one yearns for the philosophical solitudes of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.
In 1751, Voltaire accepted the pressing invitations to Berlin of the Prussian "philosopher-king" Frederick II, but soon fell out with his ruthless patron. It scarcely helped when he overheard the king say he was merely "sucking the orange and thowing away the peel". His escape in 1753 and and arrest in Frankfurt are related by Pearson as comic opera. Taking refuge in the Protestant republic of Geneva the following year, Voltaire set up house with Denis overlooking the lake. Finding the Calvinists unfriendly to the theatre, they moved four years later across the French border to Ferney. Here Voltaire was to spend all but the last weeks of his life.
Like Sir Walter Scott two generations later, Voltaire had the money to realise his feudal and patriarchal dreams, setting up watch-making workshops and model villages. His annual income was 150,000 livres, and he employed 14 servants, not counting the secretary who collected this information, for 843 livres. Having lent money to hard-up German princelings in return for generous annuities, Voltaire then cheated them by living on for years.
He became one of the most famous men in Europe and Ferney an attraction for rubbernecking grand tourists from England and Scotland, and even North America. When Voltaire took his walk in the garden, carriages lined up to deposit the quality in the courtyards while ordinary people pushed their faces against the iron gates. By 1768, Voltaire was boasting and complaining: "For 14 years now I have been the innkeeper of Europe."
In 1778, he returned to Paris and a hero's welcome at the staging of his play Irène. He died a few days later in a distinctly fishy odour of sanctity. After a certain amount of being shunted about France, well described by Pearson, his body came to rest in the Panthéon.
Voltaire was not a liberal or a democrat or a republican or an agnostic or, in the modern sense, a philosopher. With his snobbery and shady finances - brought into the light by Pearson - he is as much the problem of the ancien régime as its solution.
His enemy was the Infâme, which people used to think was his code for Jesus Christ but actually seems to have comprised some but not all of the forces of clerical reaction and feudal injustice.
Frederick the Great understood him: "You will always caress the Infâme with one hand while scratching it with the other." At Ferney, he tried to move out of view, not demolish, the village church. The years at Ferney saw a tide of aggressive anti-clerical pamphlets above which Pearson does well to keep his head. The tide turns and Voltaire ends up fulminating against the new atheism.
Yet more than any of the 18th-century reformers, Voltaire got his hands dirty. The best chapter in the book tells of the Calas affair, where Voltaire deployed all his energy, influence and wit to gain a posthumous pardon for a poor Protestant shopkeeper executed, without a shred of evidence, in Toulouse in 1762. Voltaire went on to become the champion of many other victims of what passed for justice in France.
Adam Smith, in Toulouse a couple of years later, was haunted by Jean Calas's innocence and indomitable courage under torture. He merely wrote about him (very beautifully) years after the event. Of all the countless theorists of "natural law", from Pufendorf to Montesquieu, only Voltaire (and Cesare Beccaria) quoted verdicts and frequented prisons. For Pearson, it is Voltaire's campaigns for justice as much as his wit or Candide that guarantee the old roué a place in the pantheon of liberty.
· James Buchan is the author of Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (John Murray)