Voltaire and the Weapon Called Wit

He was imprisoned twice, exiled repeatedly, censored constantly, and outlived all of it to become the most celebrated mind in Europe.  In this episode Sophie examines the life of François-Marie Arouet - better known as Voltaire - whose wit, satirical genius and tireless advocacy for civil liberties made him the defining voice of the Enlightenment and a direct intellectual ancestor of both the French and American revolutions.  From the Bastille to the court of Frederick the Great to his famous estate at Ferney, Sophie traces how Voltaire transformed the pen into the era's most dangerous weapon - and how his greatest work, Candide, delivered its philosophical payload by making readers laugh first and think second.  Her modern comparison is a fellow traveler in wit, exile and sacred-cow-slaying who also preferred the essay to the barricade and the perfectly aimed sentence to the manifesto.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Voltaire and the Weapon Called Wit, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people whose relationship to authority was, shall we say, combative, wearer of a scarf that a philosophy colleague described this morning as offensively cheerful for a Monday, to which I responded that Monday is precisely when cheerfulness is most necessary and most subversive, and which exchange I mentioned because it has in miniature the quality of nearly everything today's subject ever said to anyone in a position of power, the light touch that lands with the force of a very precisely aimed brick. Today we are going to France, eighteenth century France, the France of absolute monarchy and the Catholic Church at the height of its institutional arrogance, of Letter de Cachet, the royal warrant by which anyone could be imprisoned without trial at the king's pleasure, of censorship so comprehensive that most of the most important books of the century were published under false names, in false locations, or not published in France at all, a France of gilded salons and grinding poverty, of philosophical brilliance and judicial torture, of the most sophisticated artistic culture in Europe operating inside a political structure, that was essentially medieval in its assumptions about who had the right to say what. Into this, France was born on november twenty first, sixteen ninety-four, in Paris, Francois Marie Arrouet, the man who would rename himself Voltaire, and who would spend the next eighty three years being by most historical assessments, the most influential single mind of the eighteenth century, not the deepest, not the most systematic, not the most philosophically rigorous, the most influential, the one whose ideas travelled furthest, fastest, in the most accessible form to the largest audience, and changed directly, measurably, historically, verifiably. The world I want to be precise about what I mean by influential, because it is a word that historians deploy frequently and carefully, and which in Voltaire's case carries a specific and extraordinary weight. Voltaire's ideas ultimately found expression in the French and American Revolutions. This is not a metaphor. The Declaration of Independence contains echoes of Voltaire's arguments about natural rights and religious tolerance. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, adopted by the French National Assembly in 1789, reflects the Enlightenment framework that Voltaire did more than anyone to popularize the separation of church and state that became, in various forms, the constitutional foundation of modern liberal democracies. This is Voltaire's project, prosecuted across sixty years of writing with the consistency and the energy of someone who had identified the precise problem and was not going to stop pointing at it until someone fixed it. He did not fix it himself. He never held political office, never commanded an army, never led a revolution. What he did was considerably more interesting and considerably more durable. He changed what educated people believed it was reasonable to believe, and once you have changed that, the political consequences are eventually inevitable. But let us not begin at the end. Let us begin at the beginning, which is Paris, and a middle class family, and a Jesuit education, and a mind that was already, by adolescence, too quick and too sharp for the institutions available to contain it. Voltaire was born Francois Marie Arrouet to a prosperous family on november twenty first, sixteen ninety four, in Paris. He was the youngest of five children born to Francois Arrouet and Marie Marguerite Domar. When Voltaire was just seven years old, his mother passed away. His father was a notary, respectable, prosperous, entirely conventional, who intended his son to study law. His godfather, the Abbe de Chateauneuf, was a free thinker of the Temple Circle, the fashionable Parisian society of libertine intellectual life that operated in the interstices of official culture. The boy who grew up between these two influences, the respectable professional father and the free thinking godfather, became, predictably and entirely characteristically, a writer. In 1704, Voltaire was enrolled at the College Louis Legrand, a Jesuit secondary school in Paris, where he received a classical education and began showing promise as a writer. The Jesuits of Louis Legrand were, whatever else they were, excellent teachers. They gave Voltaire Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, and a thorough grounding in classical literature that he would draw on for the rest of his life. They also gave him somewhat unintentionally a detailed and intimate acquaintance with the arguments for and against Catholic Orthodoxy, that proved, in the hands of a man of his particular disposition, more useful to the critics of the Church than to its defenders. He was not, despite what his subsequent reputation might suggest, a straightforward atheist. Voltaire, in keeping with other Enlightenment thinkers of the era, was a deist, not by faith, according to him, but rather by reason. He believed in God in the specific, stripped down, philosophically minimal sense, of believing that the universe requires a first cause, what he called the watchmaker god, who set the mechanism in motion and then stepped back and let it run. What he did not believe in was the institutional church, ecclesiastical authority, the index of forbidden books, the inquisition, religious persecution, or the divine right of priests to tell him what he was allowed to think, and his most famous phrase Ecraset L'enfame, which translates approximately as crush the infamous thing, referring to superstition and fanaticism, which in practice meant the church, captures the quality of his opposition with precision. Not dispassionate theological disagreement, passionate, personal, sustained hostility to what he regarded as the primary institutional force, keeping human beings ignorant and afraid. After leaving the Jesuits, he frequented the Temple Circle, where free thinking was the admission fee. He began writing poetry, satire, epigrams. He was quick, brilliantly quick, with the specific quickness of someone who sees the gap between what an institution claims to be and what it actually is, and who has the verbal precision to describe the gap in terms that make the reader laugh and then wince. This is a specific gift, distinct from intelligence and distinct from learning, and Voltaire had it in such abundance that it became essentially his primary mode of engagement with the world. In seventeen sixteen, Voltaire was exiled to Toul for mocking the Duc d'Orléans. In 1717 he returned to Paris, only to be arrested and exiled to the Bastille for a year on charges of writing libelous poetry. He was twenty two years old when he went to the Bastille. He used the imprisonment productively. He worked on his first major play, Odipe, and on the epic poem La Henriade. He emerged eleven months later with a finished play and a new name. He had entered as Francois Marie Arrouet. He would leave, and thereafter always sign himself as Voltaire. The name's precise origin is disputed. It may be an anagram of Arrouis Lejeune, with the letters I and U distinguished, as was common in Latin, or it may have other origins. What matters is the deliberateness of the choice. He was shedding an identity and constructing a new one. The man who went to the Bastille was a clever young Paritsian with a dangerous pen. The man who came out was Voltaire. A project, a persona, a weapon. Oedipus was a tremendous success, and by the age of twenty four, the notorious Voltaire had become a literary sensation. For the next decade he was the most celebrated wit in Parisian society, admired, sought after, read, quoted, and intermittently in danger. The danger returned definitively in 1726, when a quarrel with the Chevalier de Roan, an aristocrat who had mocked Voltaire's adopted name, asking who this Voltaire was, since everyone knew that Arouis was his real name, ended with Voltaire being beaten by the Chevalier servants, imprisoned briefly in the Bastille for the indiscretion of threatening to duel his attacker, and then exiled to England. England changed him. He became interested in England, the country that tolerated freedom of thought. He arrived in seventeen twenty six, and remained nearly three years, learning English. He spoke it fluently within a year, studying Newton, reading Locke, observing the constitutional monarchy, the relative freedom of the press, the religious pluralism, the scientific culture of the Royal Society. He was received well. He met Swift, Pope, the literary and philosophical elite of Hanoverian England, and he found in English society a working example of something he had previously been able to argue for only theoretically. A society in which the church did not control thought, in which the press was relatively free, in which religious minorities were tolerated, and in which the results were prosperity, scientific progress, intellectual vitality, rather than the moral chaos that French Catholic Orthodoxy insisted must follow from such permissiveness. His letters on the English, published in 1733, angered the French church and government, forcing the writer to flee to safer pastures. The letters, known in French as the Lettres Philosophiques, are among the most strategically effective pieces of Enlightenment polemic ever written. They described English society in terms that were simultaneously flattering about England and devastatingly critical of France without ever making the criticism explicit. Voltaire simply described what he had seen, the freedom, the tolerance, the scientific progress. The implication that France, operating under the opposite principles, produced the opposite results, was left to the reader to draw. The reader drew it. The French authorities did not find this acceptable. A letre de Cachet was issued. Voltaire fled to the chateau of his mistress, the Marquise Du Chatelet, at Sir Blais in Lorraine. And here the biography takes a turn that I think is insufficiently celebrated in the popular accounts of Voltaire, and which matters enormously for understanding the full scope of what he was. Emily Du Chartlet was not simply Voltaire's mistress, she was one of the most extraordinary intellects of the eighteenth century, a mathematician and physicist whose translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica into French, with her own mathematical commentary, remains in print and in use, who was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, who corresponded with Leibniz's successors, who published her own institutions de physique, a comprehensive synthesis of Newtonian and Leibnizan physics. She was, by any serious assessment, the more rigorous scientific mind of the two, and Voltaire knew it and said so. He described her as a great man whose only fault was being a woman. This quote has attracted deserved criticism as a piece of unreconstructed eighteenth century sexism, which it is. It also reflects something more complicated, a genuine recognition of her intellectual superiority in the domains of mathematics and physics, expressed in the only language available to an eighteenth century Frenchman who had not yet developed the conceptual vocabulary for female intellectual equality, but who could see clearly enough that what she was doing exceeded what he could do. They lived together at Saray for fifteen years, working she on her mathematics and physics, he on his histories and plays and philosophical tales, in an arrangement of productive, affectionate intellectual companionship that was, by the standards of eighteenth century France, entirely unconventional, and by the evidence, genuinely happy. She died in seventeen forty nine at forty two, of complications following childbirth. The child was not Voltaire's, and the whole thing has the poignant complexity of a human situation that no one involved quite managed with grace, and which Voltaire's grief about was, by the accounts of those around him, entirely genuine. He wrote I have not lost merely a mistress, I have lost half of myself, a soul for which mine was made. After Siray came Prussia. Voltaire moved to Prussia in seventeen fifty as a member of Frederick the Great's court. Frederick II of Prussia, Frederick the Great, was the archetype of the eighteenth century's most interesting political category, the enlightened despot. He read philosophy, corresponded with the philosophs, played the flute, wrote poetry in French, which he regarded as the only civilized language, and ran one of the most efficient military autocracies in Europe. He and Voltaire had been corresponding since 1736, and the relationship had all the characteristics of a mutual admiration society in which both parties were too perceptive not to suspect the admiration was partly strategic. Voltaire arrived in Potsdam in 1750. The relationship between him and Frederick deteriorated within three years. Voltaire got into serious trouble in Prussia, involving himself in a scandalous legal case and taking a compromising book of Frederick's private poems without the ruler's permission, he was arrested and forced to return it. There was also the matter of Voltaire's ruthless satirization of Maupertuis, the president of Frederick's Berlin Academy, in a pamphlet called The Diatriebe du Doctor Acadia, which Frederick ordered burned in the public square. The relationship collapsed acrimoniously. Voltaire left Prussia in 1753 with the disillusionment of a man who had tested the theory of enlightened despotism against the reality, and found the reality wanting. His disappointments and disillusions with Frederick the Great changed his philosophy somewhat, and soon gave birth to one of his most enduring works, his novella Candid. Candid, published in 1759, is the book that I think most completely represents Voltaire, not in the sense of being his most philosophically rigorous work, because it isn't, but in the sense of being the fullest expression of what his mind was actually like. It is a novella, short enough to read in an afternoon. It is the story of a young man of incorrigible optimism, who travels through a world of unrelenting catastrophe, war, earthquake, the inquisition, slavery, shipwreck, accompanied by a philosopher named Pangloss, who explains at every disaster, that this is all for the best, in the best of all possible worlds, because this is the philosophical position of Leibniz, and Leibniz must be right. The joke is that the world is demonstrably comprehensively terrible, and the joke lands because it is also true. This novel stands as an all out attack on the philosophy of optimism, which states that everything that happens, no matter how horrible, is for the best. In its place, Voltaire offers a simple practical solution to the world's problems, cooperation, or more precisely the famous closing line Ilfo cultive notre jardin. We must cultivate our garden. The conclusion of the book after every philosophical system has been found inadequate to the actual experience of suffering, is that the correct response to an incomprehensible world is practical action in the specific place where you actually live, not system building, not theodicy, gardening. This is not a retreat from thought. It is the most sophisticated and the most honest conclusion available to a man of Voltaire's intelligence and experience. He had tested the optimists and found them naive. He had tested the enlightened despots and found them self-serving. He had lived through the Lisbon earthquake of seventeen fifty five, which killed thirty thousand people in six minutes, and which shattered the philosophical complacency of those who believed that a benevolent God presided over a rationally ordered universe. He had concluded with the clarity of eighty years of evidence that the world was not arranged for human happiness, and that the appropriate response was not to construct a philosophical system explaining why it was, but to get on with the available work. He did not retire to a garden. He retired to Ferney, his estate on the Franco Swiss border, where he spent the next twenty years entertaining half of Europe, writing at a pace that still astonishes biographers, corresponding with Catherine the Great. And Frederick and every significant intellectual figure on the continent, and involving himself in a series of causes celebre that represent the most direct and most practically effective dimension of his career. The case of Jean Callas is the most significant. Callas was a huguenot merchant in Toulouse who was accused in seventeen sixty two of murdering his son to prevent him converting to Catholicism. He was tortured and publicly executed, broken on the wheel, before his guilt was established by anything resembling adequate evidence. Voltaire, from Fernay, conducted a campaign of extraordinary persistence and effectiveness to have the verdict overturned. From 1762, as an unmatched intellectual celebrity, he began to champion unjustly persecuted individuals, most famously the Huguenot merchant Jean Callas. Callas had been tortured to death in 1763, supposedly because he had murdered his eldest son for wanting to convert to Catholicism. Voltaire mobilized European public opinion, wrote pamphlets, corresponded with ministers and philosophers, and in 1765 secured the posthumous rehabilitation of Jean Calas, the official acknowledgement that the conviction had been unjust, issued by the Royal Council. This was not merely a personal victory, it was a demonstration that public opinion, when organized and articulate, could challenge and overturn the decisions of official justice. It was in miniature the thing that the Enlightenment was theoretically for, the application of reason to the scrutiny of power made practically real. Voltaire had done it. He had done it with his pen, from his estate in Fernay at the age of sixty eight. This is the Voltaire that the literary tradition tends to underweight in favour of Candide and the wit, and it is the Voltaire I find most historically interesting. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing more than twenty thousand letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets. In eighty-three years of life across imprisonments and exiles, and the death of Emily and the disillusionment of Prussia, and the Lisbon earthquake, and the sustained hostility of the French authorities and the Catholic Church, he wrote two hundred and five volumes worth of material. He also, during this period, managed estates, funded local industries, cultivated his garden, literally at Ferney, and received a constant stream of distinguished European visitors who came to pay court to the most famous living writer in the world. He died on may thirtieth, seventeen seventy eight, in Paris, having returned to the city after twenty eight years of exile to see the opening of his final play, Urene, and to receive a rapturous public ovation that reportedly moved him to tears. In February of that year, fearing he would die, he wrote, I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition. He was eighty-three years old, the Catholic Church refused him burial in Paris. He was buried at an abbey in Champagne. Thirteen years later, with the revolution well underway, his remains were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, the secular temple of French national heroes, in a ceremony of extraordinary public magnificence. He was accompanied to the Pantheon by a crowd estimated at several hundred thousand people. He would have found the irony delicious. He would have written something about it. It would have been very funny and slightly cruel and entirely accurate. Now, the T's Picture a person born into comfortable circumstances in one of the great cultural capitals of the world, who received a first class education from the best institutions their era offered, and who repaid that education by using everything it gave them to attack the assumptions on which the institutions themselves were founded. Someone whose primary weapon was language, specifically, the particular kind of language that makes an audience simultaneously laugh and recognise an uncomfortable truth. Wit deployed in the service of argument. Comedy as critique, the joke that lands like a brick. Picture someone who was imprisoned, exiled, censored, threatened, and repeatedly forced to operate from outside the jurisdiction of the authority that found them inconvenient, and who used the distance of exile productively, learning from the cultures and political systems they encountered, and returning with new material and new arguments, someone for whom displacement was not catastrophe, but education. Picture someone whose relationship to the powerful figures of their era was one of simultaneously cultivated proximity and maintained critical independence, who needed patrons and courts and institutional support to operate at the level their ambitions required, and who consistently eventually fell out with those patrons when the critical independence they could not quite suppress became intolerable to the people who were paying for it. Picture someone whose most enduring work is a short, savage, funny piece of fiction, not a philosophical treatise, not a historical study, but a comic narrative of relentless disaster that made a philosophical argument with more force and more reach than any systematic treatment of the same ideas could have managed. Someone who understood instinctively that the most effective way to change what people think is not to present them with an argument, but to make them laugh, because laughter produces agreement before the critical faculties have had time to object. Picture someone who spent the final decades of their career not writing masterpieces, but campaigning, using the cultural authority they had accumulated over a lifetime to intervene in specific concrete cases of injustice and winning. Someone for whom the Enlightenment was not a theoretical programme, but a practical instrument to be applied to actual people in actual danger. Picture someone who died celebrated, controversial, and in the middle of an argument they had started, and that would outlast them by centuries. Who is this? It is Christopher Hitchens. I hear from here a range of responses that the passage of time since his death in 2011 has not entirely settled. That is, I think, entirely appropriate. Hitchins was not the kind of figure about whom settled responses are available, or perhaps desirable, and Voltaire was not either. Christopher Eric Hitchins was born on april thirteenth, nineteen forty nine, in Portsmouth, England, the son of a Royal Navy officer he called the commander, and of a mother, Yvonne, whose Jewish heritage he did not learn of until relatively late in his life, and which he wrote about with characteristic candour and characteristic complexity. He was educated at the Lay's School in Cambridge, not Cambridge University, though that followed, at um Baliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics, and moved in the particular social world of Oxford sixties leftism, that produced a remarkable number of people who subsequently spent their lives either practising or critiquing the political positions they formed there. He was a journalist, an essayist, a polemicist, a literary critic, a travel writer, a biographer, a war correspondent, and a controversialist, the word controversialist being both the most accurate and the most insufficient description of what he was. He wrote for The New Statesman, for The Nation, for Vanity Fair, for Slate, and for a dozen other publications across a career of nearly forty years. He wrote books on Kissinger, on Mother Teresa, on Thomas Jefferson, on Thomas Paine, on George Orwell. He wrote a memoir, Hitch 22, that is one of the better autobiographies of the twentieth century. He wrote God is not great, how religion poisons everything which sold in the millions, and which the Voltaire connection makes, among other things, extremely legible. It is, in a meaningful sense, the Ecrasé La Femme for the twenty first century. He was also, as Voltaire was, a man of significant and documented contradictions. His support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he defended with the same rhetorical brilliance and the same total commitment that he brought to everything, and which a significant portion of his former allies on the left regarded as an unforgivable betrayal, and which he himself never recanted, created a rupture in his public career as consequential as any of Voltaire's quarrels with the institutions of his era. Both men fell out with their natural political homes over positions they refused to abandon despite the cost. Voltaire's disillusionment with Frederick the Great was political. Hitchens's disillusionment with the left was political. In both cases the break was painful, public, and productive of some of their most interesting writing. The parallels are structural and precise. First, the wit as weapon. Both men were, by the evidence of almost everyone who encountered them, the most verbally quick person in most rooms they entered. Both used this quality not merely for entertainment, but for argument. The devastating observation, the perfectly constructed analogy, the question that invalidates the position before the position has finished being stated. Both understood that wit is a form of intellectual violence, it does not refute an argument so much as make it ridiculous, which in most contexts is considerably more effective. Second, the imprisonment and exile as education. Voltaire's Bastille imprisonment led to his English exile, which produced the Lettre Philosophiques. His exile from Paris after the Lettres led to Ciret and Emily Duchart, which produced the serious scientific and historical work. His disillusionment with Frederick produced candid. Each displacement was productive. Hitchens was not imprisoned. He lived in a time and a jurisdiction that did not imprison writers for satire, which Voltaire would have noted with a mixture of admiration and envy. But his career was shaped by a succession of voluntary and involuntary displacements, from England to America, from the left to his own specific post ideological position, from the culture of literary journalism to the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Kurdistan, and elsewhere that he was covering, and also, in some sense, cheerleading, each move produced new work, new arguments, new perspectives. Third, the relationship to power and its discontents. Voltaire needed courts and needed patrons and resented needing them. He cultivated Frederick and Catherine, and the patronage of powerful French families, and found each relationship compromised by the same fundamental incompatibility. He could not be both a critical intelligence and a compliant one. Hitchins cultivated access to politicians, to power centres, to the American foreign policy establishment, and found the same incompatibility. He was welcome in Washington and in Westminster as a celebrity intellectual, a literary star who could be invited to dinners, and he was simultaneously unable to stop saying what he thought about what he saw in those rooms, which made the welcome intermittently uncomfortable for everyone, including himself. Fourth, the late career campaign for justice. Voltaire's calas affair was the moment when his celebrity became a practical instrument for a specific, concrete case. Hitchens's sustained campaign against Henry Kissinger, documented in the book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, attempted something structurally similar, to use the cultural authority of the public intellectual to bring a specific, powerful person to account for specific acts. The Callus Campaign succeeded. The Kissinger campaign did not, at least not in the immediate legal sense, but both were expressions of the same impulse that the writer's job is not only to generate ideas, but to use those ideas as instruments of practical intervention in actual injustice. Fifth, the Deism and its discontents. Voltaire was a deist who opposed the church with everything he had. Hitchens was an atheist who opposed organized religion with everything he had. The theological position is different. Deism and atheism are not the same, but the specific antagonist is similar. Both men targeted institutional religion not as a matter of abstract theological disagreement, but as a practical, political, human rights issue. The damage done to actual human beings by the power of religious institutions to coerce belief, suppress inquiry, and punish dissent. Crush the infamous thing and God is not great are different texts in different centuries, and they are also the same book. Where do the parallels strain? Voltaire lived eighty-three years. Hitchens died at sixty-two of esophageal cancer in December 2011. The career was cut short in ways that make the comparison of late life periods asymmetric. The Fernie Years, the Callus Affair, the two hundred and five volumes were the product of a very long life that Hitchens did not have. Voltaire was primarily a writer of fiction and philosophy who intervened in political cases. Hitchens was primarily a political and literary journalist who wrote books. The generic difference matters for how their influence operated and accumulated, and Voltaire's wit was in the specific French rhetorical tradition of the eighteenth century differently tooled from Hitchens's. The English essay tradition, the Anglo American journalistic form, the television debate. These are different instruments from the Conte Philosophique, the Lettre Philosophique, the pamphlet. Both men mastered the instruments available to them. The instruments were not identical. The verdict Voltaire, and I say this with the genuine acknowledgement that Christopher Hitchens is the comparison in this series that I find personally most compelling to argue against the verdict, because Hitchens is the figure I find myself on reflection and against the evidence I am about to give most inclined to want to choose. But Voltaire is more significant, and the significance is of a different order. Hitchins changed what millions of people thought about religion and the Iraq War and Henry Kissinger. Voltaire changed what educated Europeans thought was possible. What kind of society was rational to expect? What claims the church had the right to make? What arguments the state had the right to suppress? The American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man are, in a direct and traceable genealogy, downstream of Voltaire. No equivalent political document is downstream of Hitchens, not yet. Perhaps not ever. The scale is different. There is also the matter of Candid versus the collected works of Hitchens. Both are good books. Candid is something rarer, a book so efficient in its satirical mechanism, so perfectly calibrated in its targets, and so enduringly accurate in its fundamental insight about the gap between philosophical optimism and actual human experience, that it has been continuously in print for two hundred and sixty five years and shows no signs of stopping. The shelf life of Hitchens is journalism, much of it brilliant, all of it pegged to specific occasions, will be determined by whether the occasions it was written about retain historical interest. The shelf life of Candide is at this point empirically established. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, where we do not produce Voltaire's, we produce people who are slightly suspicious of excessive cleverness, and who consider dry wit a more appropriate register than savage satire. I find Voltaire, his energy, his productivity, his refusal to stop arguing, his ability to be funny about things that were for the people involved, genuinely terrible, simultaneously admirable and slightly exhausting, which I suspect was the response of most people who knew him. It is, frankly, the response I have to most of the figures in this series, which may tell you something about the kind of historical subjects I choose. Francois Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, born Paris, november twenty first, sixteen ninety four, died Paris, may thirtieth, seventeen seventy eight, playwright, historian, philosopher, polemicist, satirist, correspondent, enlightenment. The man who described the Lisbon earthquake in verse, imprisoned the church's pretensions in Candide, and freed Jean Calas posthumously through the exercise of a celebrity that he had spent sixty years building with his pen. Two hundred and five volumes, more than twenty thousand letters one famous phrase Ecraset Linfemme. He is still right. That is the most important thing about him. He is still right. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. Candide can be read in an afternoon and should be. Ian Davidson's biography Voltaire A Life is the best recent English language treatment of the full career. And if you want to understand why the Enlightenment matters, why it is not merely a period in European intellectual history, but an ongoing argument that is still being had, still by the same sides, still with the same stakes, start with Voltaire. He will make you laugh. He will make you angry. He will make you think in that order and sometimes simultaneously. Good night.