Biography: In this pithy, engaging biography, Roger Pearson narrates the life-story of Voltaire: 18th-century French writer, thinker, campaigner, and key figure of the Enlightenment. Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet, also called Zozo) was a true giant of the 18th century and he is arguably gaining fresh relevance now, at the outset of this alternately fanatical and censorious new 21st century.
A highly prolific writer, Voltaire is perhaps best remembered nowadays for his ironic philosophical tale, Candide, and for his campaigning for human rights. Yet Voltaire exercised influence over contemporaries in areas as varied as poetry, theatre, science, law, history and philosophy. He was also, bizarrely, involved in money-lending, tights manufacturing, watchmaking, gardening and spying.
Undaunted by the difficulties of pinning down such a chameleon-like subject, Pearson portrays Voltaire's many identities by transposing them into 21st-century equivalents. In evoking the "travelling salesman", the "wealthy member of a triumphant lottery syndicate", or the "ex-con" episodes of Voltaire's life, Pearson clearly aspires to introduce a whole new raft of future readers to this versatile writer and activist. Over the centuries, Voltaire has suffered from bad press and five-volume biographies. In this latest rendering of his life, we finally witness the 19th-century misreadings and reinterpretations being categorically brushed aside. Where popular myth presumed Voltaire to be a revolutionary and an atheist, Pearson firmly quashes such erroneous perceptions, reinstating the writer as a supporter of enlightened monarchy and as a firm, lifelong deist. It is with a certain verve that this particular biography of the great Voltaire practically salsa-dances its subject into the 21st century and beyond.
As one who simply oozed energy, Voltaire spent an 84-year-long lifetime writing probing works of a subversive nature that criticised the very foundations of the ancien régime: the judiciary, the monarchy and the Church. In his écrasez l'infâme! (crush infamy!) campaign, he strove to combat the supersitition, fanaticism and intolerance that characterised that régime. Yet, this same Voltaire avidly courted official approval at every opportunity. As an illegitimate, but aspirant, aristocrat, he wooed and corresponded with monarchs across Europe, from Catherine the Great (Russia) to Frederick the Great (Prussia), and he even accepted a court appointment as royal historiographer under Louis XV at Versailles. It was only in later life that Voltaire finally experienced any degree of true liberty. By this time, having lived in Paris, London and Berlin, he had settled on the border between Geneva and France. There, he began to cultivate the garden of his own château and engage in avid letter-campaigns in defence of human rights, in the village now renamed Ferney-Voltaire. Before that, he was hounded, exiled, imprisoned, censored, pursued and silenced. As a result of his defiant resistance, Voltaire became a myth in his own time and remains an icon of free expression the world over.
Voltaire's life-story is worthy of a Hollywood epic, spanning love affairs, war, imprisonment, royalty, fireworks, champagne, exile, coronation and a smuggled corpse, and Pearson does not disappoint the reader. It is no mean feat that Voltaire's own energetic style and pithiness permeate this text, as Pearson mimics the philosophe's light-hearted, entertaining and deceptively simple prose style. Very like Voltaire, this biographer fuses the most up-to-date research with narrative conciseness, writing to entertain as well as to inform. The more attentive reader is provided with nudges, winks and quips. And, just as Voltaire did, Pearson manages to explain complex ideas in a few, crystal-clear words.
Thus, Pascal's wager becomes what modern investment analysts call a "no-brainer". The philosophes are defined as "intrepid human minds shining the light of Reason into the dark corners of our ignorance". In this manner, the biography targets a general readership, far beyond academia. Playing with words and images, Pearson daringly evokes 21st-century controversies that parallel 18th-century Voltairean concerns. Just like in Voltaire's texts, the present day is never far beneath the surface. Whether citing the recent Bishop of Durham controversy or evoking the Irish propensity for potato-cakes, Pearson manages to make Voltaire provoke and tease.
With a further nod to 18th-century practices, Pearson even adopts the provision of chapter subtitles (as in Voltaire's Candide) with pseudo-simplistic ironic flourishes like the summary that reads: "Our hero is bled, absolved and crowned".
But what makes Voltaire so topically relevant as to merit a biography at the dawn of another millennium? Just last December, near Ferney-Voltaire, a production of Voltaire's play Mahomet provoked the same polar reactions as it had in 1741. The "literal" readers perceived an attack on Islam. Public demonstrations, stoning and arson ensued. But the local mayor insisted that the play simply conveys what Pearson calls "the old Voltairean message": that all official religions are an imposture in the service of political oppression. Nearly three centuries after the philosophe lived, fighting the good fight for freedom of expression, justice and tolerance remains as crucial as ever.
Síofra Pierse is lecturer in French at UCD and IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Fellow 2005-6. She is editor of The City in French Writing: the Eighteenth-Century Experience/ Écrire la ville au dix-huitième siècle, published by UCD Press in 2004
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom By Roger Pearson Bloomsbury, 448pp. £18.99