Volatire

Ian Davidson, “Voltaire”, Profile Books LTD, 2010, 560 pp  (Kindle Library Edition)

“Voltaire”:… I saw the title when browsing available library E-books for my Kindle.  Visions  of a childhood catechism class popped into my head.  The priest lecturing us at that event, for some now-forgotten reason, was discussing Voltaire.  The priest emphatically stated that because of Voltaire’s atheism he died from worms eating him.  This horrifying thought sunk into my little head; it may well be the only thing that sunk into mine during all those sessions.  So when I saw the library E-book of that title, I figured it was time to check on the worm story.  Surprise, surprise: can you believe that priest was mistaken?  I firmly believe the priest believed his story.    In any event, Voltaire was not an atheist—he just didn’t believe in the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish version of events. He did, however, play an important role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. 

“Voltaire” (the book) is really too detailed for beach reading, too detailed for someone with something else to do,  and too detailed for someone not questioning childhood received wisdom.  Luckily none of these apply to me.  The book is exhaustingly researched using 15,284 surviving letters Voltaire wrote to 1,500 different people during his 84-year life:  He must have been the facebook/twitter compulsive of the 18^th century.  Author Ian Davidson took on this biographical task when he discovered that no biography of Voltaire had been published in English for 20 years prior to 2010 and none were in print.

Voltaire, born in 1694 and living until 1778, by which time the French Revolution was only 11 years off,  was very productive.  He was France's dominant playwright for 40 years, although none are performed today.  He did not get along with Rousseau and kind of despised Shakespeare, whose plays began to displace his on the stage.  Of course, he was also a renowned author as evidenced in his great 1759 satirical novel Candide.  He was in constant conflict with the ancient regime in France as well as with the Catholic church.  He continually protested the Ancien Régime's practice of trials behind closed doors, without legal representation for the accused, leading to sentences of prolonged torture (such as being "broken on the wheel") before subjection to some brutal form of death.  Also, the central constant in Voltaire’s life was his belief in toleration and freedom of speech, and it is that which makes his life so relevant and of such compelling interest today.

My Notes:

Voltaire eventually became very wealthy from proceeds from his plays and his books.  Exiled from Paris for decades until almost the end of his life, Voltaire took up farm management with enthusiasm, discovered first-hand just how poor many peasants were and, somewhat paternalistically, made sure that "his" people had jobs and a reasonable standard of living. Later, at Ferney, he used skilled exiles from Geneva to establish a watch-making industry, which lasted into the 19th century.

·        Commodity prices more than doubled between the death of Louis XIV and the French Revolution, whereas wages increased by only about 20 per cent. On his death in 1715, the French state was being crushed under the burden of a national debt amounting to over 3.5 billion francs, which could not even be serviced, let alone repaid.  The regent turned to John Law, the Scottish financial innovator.  Law set up a French central bank and had laws passed making the bank the lynchpin of the economy.  He acquired the monopoly control of colonial development and set up a stock market in which anybody could invest. It was a great bubble with a short life.  It had a lasting effect of discrediting the idea of paper money and prevented the establishment of a modern banking system in France for well over a century. 

·        Smallpox was common throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, and often fatal: the number of deaths from epidemics may have averaged some 400,000 a year.  In France the medical establishment and the Church were opposed to inoculation on dogmatic grounds, and continued to resist it for much of the eighteenth century. 

·        Perinatal (the period shortly before and after birth) mortality was about 50 percent. 

·        On 14 April 1718 Voltaire was released from imprisonment in the Bastille after eleven months confinement for writing a play praising King Henry IV, who had given religious freedom to the Huguenots. This freedom had been withdrawn by the revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes and Louis XIV had re-instituted state persecution of Protestants.  Voltaire was not afforded a trial but was imprisoned by a letter de cachet which meant his detention was of indefinite duration and could last for as long or as short as the royal authority chose.

·        In France it was the theories of Descartes which were held to be the true orthodoxy, both in science and in philosophy; they were incompatible with the theories of Newton and Locke, but they were endorsed by the establishment and the Catholic Church.  If Newton and Locke were right, then Descartes must be wrong.  Descartes was a dualist, who distrusted the senses and believed that there is a total separation between mind and matter.  The essence of the individual person is his soul: (I think therefore I am).  The theological importance of this idea was that it made it much easier to maintain that the soul was immortal, even if the body was not.  One of the corollaries of Descares’s dualism was that he also believed that we are born with innate ideas.  Locke disputed that we are born with innate ideas.  The Catholic Church deemed this in conflict with Chritian Revelation.

·        A key difference between Voltaire and some of the younger intellectuals of the Enlightenment was that he remained a Deist who believed in some kind of benevolent God, though not the God of Christianity.

·        In the eyes of the Catholic Church, actors and actresses were deemed to be excommunicate.