Sent away, Voltaire stayed in the thick of it

In “Voltaire in Exile,” Ian Davidson presents a miniaturist’s view of the vast panorama of 18th century cultural change and upheaval we know as the Enlightenment, focusing on the last 25 years in the life of one of its embodiments, the French philosophe Voltaire, to give the contemporary reader a sense of the excitement and uncertainty of the movement that laid the foundations of the modern world.

By 1753, when Davidson’s story opens, Voltaire was one of the most famous men in Europe, a poet, a playwright, a historian, a skeptic known for his motto “ecrasez l’infame,” meaning “eliminate the terrible thing” -- i.e., the oppressive conflation of state and the Roman Catholic Church. Voltaire admired the mild English system of liberty, which he contrasted favorably to the French ancien regime.

Voltaire had been exiled from Paris by Catholic King Louis XV and was living in the farthest reaches of France near the Swiss Protestant/Calvinist city of Geneva. It was there he composed his best-remembered work, the satirical “Candide.” It was there he wrote three-quarters of his surviving 15,284 letters to friends great and small throughout Europe. And there that he became more and more involved with what we call human rights, mounting campaigns against torture and arbitrary court proceedings against hapless individuals by French courts, which were aided often by the church.

Oddly, Davidson, a retired journalist for the Financial Times of London, argues that the crusading last phase of Voltaire’s public life has been somewhat slighted; it is in fact an important part of standard accounts of his life. No matter. Davidson, drawing heavily on the published letters, presents a vivid account of Voltaire’s mounting disquiet over a tradition-bound regime around which the ice was beginning to crack.

Some of the individuals whose causes he championed were tortured horribly before being killed. A preferred method of execution was the breaking of one’s arms and legs while bound to a large wheel, followed by burning or, for noblemen, beheading.

In his campaigns, Voltaire was supported by an Italian nobleman, Cesare Bonesana, marchese di Beccaria, who went much further in denunciation of torture and capital punishment.

Beccaria, who deserves to be better honored for his role in driving torture from the respectable states of Western Europe, came up with a thorough analysis. Voltaire, as fitted his volatile nature, was more spontaneous. He was, as Davidson nicely observes, “eclectic, pragmatic and resistant to systemic thought.”

It is one of the charms of Davidson’s semi-biography that he presents Voltaire in all his human variety. Having made a lot of money in speculation earlier in his life, Voltaire was quite rich; he lent money to dukes. Outside of Geneva, he settled into a chateau at Ferney, where he entertained, continued to write and produce plays, and engaged in various moneymaking activities, the most successful of which was a watch-making industry.

Voltaire comes through in the many letters Davidson quotes as generous, vain, touchy, affectionate, impulsive and, in matters involving the human spirit, noble. Not as radical as his opponents feared and claimed, he stood for man unchained.

After the revolution his body was exhumed from the church where his supporters had had him buried and taken to a hero’s grave in the Pantheon in Paris. On the catafalque bearing his coffin were three inscriptions (the first refers to four of the judicial system’s victims for whom he fought):

“He avenged Calas, La Barre, Sirven and Monbailli.”

“Poet, philosopher, historian, he gave a great impetus to the human spirit, and prepared us to be free.”

“He combated atheists and fanatics. He inspired tolerance. He reclaimed the rights of man against serfdom and feudalism.”

Anthony Day is a regular contributor to Book Review.