Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom - Hardcover

Pearson, Roger

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582346305 ISBN 13: 9781582346304

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2005

Synopsis

With its tales of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs, and tireless battles against his critics, priests and king, Roger Pearson's Voltaire Almighty brings the father of Enlightenment to vivid life.

Voltaire Almighty provides a lively look at the life and thought of one of the major forces behind European Enlightenment. A rebel from start to finish (1694-1778), Voltaire was an ailing and unwanted bastard child who refused to die; and when he did consent to expire some eighty-four years later, he secured a Christian burial despite a bishop's ban.

During much of his life Voltaire was the toast of society for his plays and verse, but his barbed wit and commitment to human reason got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the king, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. His personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, Voltaire never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: Emilie, who died after giving birth to the child of another lover, and his niece, Marie-Louise, with whom he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. The consummate outsider; a dissenter who craved acceptance while flamboyantly disdaining it; author of countless stories, poems, books, plays, treatises, and tracts as well as some twenty thousand letters to his friends: Voltaire lived a long, active life that makes for engaging and entertaining reading.

About this title

About the Author:

Roger Pearson is Professor of French at Oxford. He has translated and edited Candide and Other Stories for Oxford World's Classics and has written several books on notable Frenchmen.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Like Davidson in Voltaire in Exile (2005), Pearson focuses his biography on one of Voltaire's philosophical passions. Whereas Davidson highlighted the crusade for justice and human rights that consumed the French writer's later years, Pearson emphasizes the love of liberty that informed Voltaire's entire life. Readers thus come to understand that it was his never-ending quest for freedom that put Voltaire in continual conflict with censors and priests, monarchs and critics. In his personal life, Voltaire's defiance of restraints meant a series of nonmarital liaisons, including amours with a prominent actress and his own iconoclastic niece. In his literary work, Voltaire dared to ridicule pontiffs and kings, even though such brazenness repeatedly put his work on the church's list of forbidden books. Surprisingly, Voltaire's refusal to accept any form of orthodoxy put him at odds not only with prelates but also with doctrinaire atheists. As a thinker who rarely followed any rules not of his own making, Voltaire incurred the wrath of authorities in France, England, and Prussia, yet Pearson shows how time and again the canny dramatist steered his way out of seeming disaster and into a promising new adventure. As a scholar at home in the French Enlightenment, Pearson translates into a saucy English the restless energy that made Voltaire one of the most brilliant figures in European literature. A spirited biography that truly captures Voltaire's irrepressible genius. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1582346305
• ISBN 13: 9781582346304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384