Was Voltaire merely an “eternal agonizer whom exceptional vital energy kept a hundred times on the edge of the grave, up to the age of 84?” Perhaps it’s difficult to admit this perspective, necessarily reductive for the biography of one of the greatest French philosophers. But, when the pen responsible for this introduction belongs to Pierre Milza, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Political Studies, one thinks twice before throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And with good reason. With this “Voltaire,” one possesses a book that one only parts with once its reading is completed. And for a good reason. From the evocation of his birth in February 1694 which only brought him “a weak breath of life” to the point where survival seemed doubtful, to his ultimate and triumphant return to Paris which cheered him and allowed, three months before his death, to be initiated into the Masonic Lodge of the “Nine Sisters” and to meet another hero of liberty in the person of Benjamin Franklin, the historian paints the portrait of a man enamored with his time, passionate in his commitments. But where Pierre Milza introduces his unique touch that makes all the difference and adds flavor to the book is in describing the behavioral meanderings of a Voltaire as courtly as desired, concerned about his image as much as his influence, and the relational networks that could contribute to it, among the Greats of the Kingdom and those belonging to his century. Despots as “enlightened” as they can be tyrannical whom the author of “Candide,” transformed into an inveterate supplicant, doesn’t hesitate, as we know, to skillfully praise in order to obtain the most improbable favors.
A man who, moreover, would never betray his only passion, that for theater, contracted during his time at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, all against a backdrop of Jesuit teachings, rhetorical jousts, and theoretical free access to modernist ideas, which probably contributed to its exacerbation. Was it the exposure to this environment, or the need for recognition for one who wasn’t from “aristocratic lineage,” the rejection by his brother after the death of a father who deliberately left him once again abandoned without a cent, the uncertainties about his parentage? Whatever the case, the young Arouet seemed very early on “devoured,” according to his “fathers,” by his appetite for fame to the point of taking on the guise of an incredibly flamboyant character.
To the libertinism of his friends who introduced him to “the Temple enclosure,” Voltaire, who already as an adolescent knew the “knees” of the scandalous Ninon de L’Enclos, finds even more pleasure in meddling in the politics of the kingdom: a sign of the level of his ambitions, he practices, so to speak, by circulating satirical verses against the Regent. With, as a verifiable reward for his genius, a full year of his life in the Bastille. Grandiose to the end, Voltaire somehow paid back the Regent and delighted in an ultimate perfidy against him: during an interview with the one who wanted, to pardon the young author’s imprisonment, to grant him an allowance, Voltaire couldn’t help but launch, feigning perfect innocence: “I thank Your Royal Highness for her willingness to take charge of my nourishment but I beg her no longer to take charge of my lodging.”
Voltaire wrote plays whose historical framework and lively atmosphere Pierre Milza restores wonderfully in which they were performed at the time. He depicts to us a young enthusiastic author, torn between his nascent convictions and the imperative needs of censorship that he strives to circumvent by deploying treasures of argumentation to convince the actors of the Comédie Française to accept his works. He shows him still, accompanying them to rehearsals or hidden on the night of a premiere to spy on comments or counter, if necessary by appearing himself on stage, possible cabals mounted against him by his adversaries. A fantastic era where the public, half on stage or in the background, also shouts from box to box, all in a “hubbub of open and slammed doors.”
A thrilling life, the tireless fight of an engaged man as one might say nowadays of an intellectual, if the expression weren’t anachronistic and debased by the contemporary embodiment of pale copies of the master. Beaten, pursued, and exiled abroad, François-Marie Arouet never deviated from his train of thought—a struggle as intransigent as obscurantism can be towards him—even if he took routes with uncertain geographical directions: Brussels, the Netherlands, London where he doesn’t fail to flatter King George II, and Prussia, marked by tumultuous relations—not only epistolary—with his protector Frederick II. In the meantime, he finds a double refuge: economic, for this theater fanatic could also reveal himself to be a formidable speculator to the point, as he once said, of knowing how to “triple his gold.” Affective then, by his meeting in 1733 with Marquise Emilie du Chatelet, lover and accomplice, whose death he mourned as “the loss of a twenty-year friend.” Banned from Versailles, Voltaire opted for the Swiss village of Ferney, from where he would wage, while building a theater of two hundred seats, his greatest battles for the defense of the persecuted: Pastor Rochette, Jean Calas, Pierre-Paul Sirven, La Barre, all cases capable of providing him with material for the writing of his “Treatise on Tolerance,” a time at which the break with the other philosopher of his time, the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is definitively consummated.
Though he devoted his life to “crushing the infamous,” Voltaire was nonetheless, according to Pierre Milza, a “personality more sensitive than his caricatured opposition to sentimentalism of Rousseau suggests.” A faithful monarchist, he was also, until the end of his life, an adherent of a “natural religion,” a form of theism that made him admit the existence of a great clockmaker of the universe. The proof is in this delightful anecdote so revealing of a man, though on the threshold of death: one morning around three o’clock, he awakened one of his guests to accompany him on a walk to the top of a small mountain. From there, the one assisting him in his morning hike describes the break of dawn: “the spectacle was magnificent… Voltaire was filled with respect, he uncovered, prostrated himself, and, when he could speak, his words were a hymn: ‘I believe, I believe in You,’ he exclaimed with enthusiasm… Almighty God, I believe!” But suddenly, climbing up, he put his hat back on, shook the dust from his knees, resumed his wrinkled figure, and looking at the sky as he sometimes looked at the Marquis de Villette when the latter said a naivety, he adds quickly: “As for Monsieur the Son, and Madame his Mother, that’s another matter.”
Pierre Milza, “Voltaire,” Editions Perrin, 2007, 915 pages, 26.50 euros.
