Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today’s U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough. (They tend to stop at Thomas Jefferson.)
Although Voltaire is absent from the party’s materials, his spirit lives on in the libertarian movement, co-founder David Nolan told me recently.
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In accidental Voltairean terms, the party rejects any attempt to constrain freedom of speech and calls for tolerance and a free, competitive market. Its platform lines up with Voltaire in its call for a world "where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power."
The similarities are perhaps as much a symptom of eternal human desires as any direct derivation from France of the 1700s. Some trace libertarianism back to Plato. But the overlap with Voltaire is striking. "Maybe it’s more a case of great minds thinking alike than any attempt to copy or emulate Voltaire," Nolan says.
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Modern readers stand in awe of Voltaire 232 years after his death, and many marvel at how this complex, contradictory writer came to be such an intellectual force. A contemporary called him "Monsieur Multiforme" for his mastery of the written word and his range of views.
Even for a man of his time, however, Voltaire had his blind spots. Like some of his high-minded contemporaries, he had a strain of anti-Semitism and a penchant for offhand cynicism. But his libertarian (libertaire, in French) convictions made him basically a force for good: a fierce advocate of free will, individual liberty, tolerance, open expression, and free trade, none of which France provided in his lifetime.
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A revival of interest in the man and his mind is now under way as Voltaire fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication Candide, his most familiar work. In my research for a book on his life and writings, I repeatedly find evidence of his connection with modern times, especially in the United States. He helps explain how we got where we are today.
Who was this François Marie Arouet, or "Voltaire" – a loose anagram of Arouet l.j. (for le jeune, the younger)? He was born in 1694, and rose to become the most durable, if not the deepest, of Europe’s 18th-century literary and philosophical thinkers. His prolific outpourings, hostile to church and state, won him two stays in the Bastille prison, plus a life on the run from the French thought police.
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The early Americans took easily to his anti-authoritarian views. He is cited in writings of the early American Francophiles Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson, in homage, purchased a bust of him for his Monticello estate in Virginia, where a modern plaster copy of it still stands.
Voltaire has never entirely lost his audience. A swirl of events and commemorations in both the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds has been under way for the past year or so. A signal occasion was the colloquium at Oxford last fall that brought together the world’s leading Voltaireans. The French had their own commemorations, and across the sea, the New York Public Library, run by Voltaire enthusiast Paul LeClerc, created a Voltaire exhibition and decorated its columns with a banner celebrating Candide.
Just a few months ago, the dean of English Voltaire experts, Prof. Nicholas Cronk of the University of Oxford, was in New York parsing forgotten Voltaire correspondence in two prominent collections. Other scholars are burrowing into manuscripts in Paris, London, Oxford, Geneva, and St. Petersburg.
All this work will become part of the 200-volume Complete Works of Voltaire now being assembled and edited by the Voltaire Foundation under Cronk’s direction, the first academic scholarly edition and by far the largest “complete” Voltaire. Now in the home stretch, Cronk hopes to keep up his pace of about six volumes per year over the next eight years to complete the collection by 2018.
August 17, 2010
