The Age of Voltaire

Summary

The Age of Voltaire is the ninth volume of The Story of Civilization, written by Will and Ariel Durant and published in 1965. Its subtitle, A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with Special Emphasis on the Conflict between Religion and Philosophy, states both its span and its organizing theme. The book opens with the death of Louis XIV and the Regency in France and closes in the years around the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, a period the authors name for the writer whose wit, campaigns and enormous correspondence seemed to them to sum up the age. The first part is devoted to France: the Regency's financial adventure under John Law, the long ministry of Cardinal Fleury, the court of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, the painting of Watteau, Chardin and Boucher, the music of Rameau, and the salons. Voltaire's life is followed through these chapters, from his imprisonment in the Bastille and his exile in England to his years at Cirey with Émilie du Châtelet, his stay at the court of Frederick the Great, and his settling near Geneva. A long section on England describes Walpole's political management, the gin-soaked poverty that Hogarth drew, the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the poetry of Pope, Swift's satire, Handel's oratorios, and the revival led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, which the Durants treat with respect as a renewal of religious feeling among the poor. Further chapters survey Italy, Spain and Portugal, the German states with Bach as their crowning genius, Austria under Maria Theresa, the rise of Prussia under Frederick, and Russia after Peter the Great. The last part of the volume turns to the theme announced in the subtitle: advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and medicine; the English deists' challenge to revealed religion; Hume's skepticism; Montesquieu's political science; the French materialists; and the beginnings of the Encyclopédie under Diderot. The Durants write as sympathetic but not uncritical admirers of the Enlightenment. They give believing figures such as Wesley, Bach and Butler serious attention, and they record Voltaire's vanity, his quarrels and his business dealings alongside his courage in defending victims of persecution. Their framing of the century as a contest between religion and philosophy is their own interpretive choice, and Christian readers will want to test it against the many thinkers of the period who were both devout and learned. Paired with Voltaire's own writings, Montesquieu, Pope, Fielding, Hume and Wesley, the volume gives students a broad and lively setting for the mid-eighteenth century.

Plot or Argument

• France after Louis XIV

  The Regency of Philippe d'Orléans, John Law's paper-money scheme and its collapse, Fleury's cautious peace, and Louis XV's court frame a long account of French manners, salons, painting, music and letters.

• Voltaire's life to the 1750s

  Interwoven with the French chapters is a biography of Voltaire: the Bastille, the English exile and the Letters on the English, the Cirey years with Madame du Châtelet and her science, the stay in Prussia and the quarrel with Frederick, and the move to the shores of Lake Geneva.

• England under Walpole and the evangelical revival

  The English book covers Walpole's system, urban poverty and the gin trade, the theater and the novel, Pope and Swift, Handel, and the preaching of the Wesleys and Whitefield.

• Southern, central and eastern Europe

  Italy's music and decline, Spain and Portugal under reforming ministers, Bach and the German states, Maria Theresa's Austria, Frederick's Prussia and the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Russia of Peter's successors.

• Science, philosophy and the challenge to faith

  The closing part surveys the scientific advance and medicine of the period, then follows the deists, Hume, Montesquieu, the French materialists and the early Encyclopédie in what the authors present as philosophy's challenge to Christian belief, with the debate over Providence after Lisbon near the end.

Characters

• Will and Ariel Durant, authors and narrators

  Historians whose humane, skeptical and admiring voice shapes the account of the century's debates.

• Voltaire, poet, dramatist, historian and polemicist

  The age's most famous writer, presented with his brilliance, generosity, vanity and lifelong war on religious intolerance.

• Émilie du Châtelet, mathematician and translator of Newton

  Voltaire's companion at Cirey, whose scientific work the Durants describe with admiration.

• Louis XV, king of France (1715-1774)

  Monarch whose indolence and private life the authors connect with the weakening of royal prestige.

• Robert Walpole, first minister of Great Britain

  Manager of Parliament through patronage, whose long peace sets the scene for English prosperity.

• John Wesley, Anglican clergyman and evangelist

  Leader of the Methodist revival, treated by the Durants as a moral force among the English poor.

• Johann Sebastian Bach, composer and church musician

  Lutheran cantor at Leipzig whose music the authors treat as the summit of German religious art.

• Frederick the Great, king of Prussia (1740-1786)

  Philosopher-king, flute player and conqueror of Silesia, Voltaire's patron and antagonist.

• Montesquieu, jurist and political philosopher

  Author of the Persian Letters and The Spirit of the Laws, presented as the founder of comparative political science.

• David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian

  Skeptic whose critiques of causation and of miracles the Durants place at the center of the philosophical challenge to religion.

Lessons

• A century framed as religion versus philosophy

  The subtitle tells readers that the Durants will emphasize a conflict between religion and philosophy. Students should recognize this as a thesis that organizes the evidence, not a neutral description, and test it against the believing scientists, composers and preachers who appear in the same pages.

  • Which figures in the book fit the Durants' conflict thesis well, and which resist it?
  • Where would Bach, Wesley or Bishop Butler place themselves in a contest between religion and philosophy?
  • Does the word 'philosophy' in the subtitle mean the same thing as philosophy in Aristotle or Aquinas?

• Voltaire's courage and Voltaire's faults

  The Durants admire Voltaire's campaigns against persecution and his clarity of style, yet they also record his flattery of kings, his feuds, his speculation in money and his mockery. Their biography lets students practice judging a public figure by his whole conduct, separating what he got right from the way he fought.

  • Which of Voltaire's actions in this volume seem to you most admirable, and which least?
  • Is mockery a legitimate weapon against cruelty? When does it become cruelty itself?
  • How did Voltaire's friendship and quarrel with Frederick reveal the limits of a philosopher at court?

• Revival among the colliers

  The Durants' chapter on the Wesleys and Whitefield shows open-air preaching to miners and laborers, hymn singing, class meetings and a demanding discipline of life, at the same time that deists in the drawing rooms were dismissing revelation. Students can compare the two movements by their effects on ordinary people as well as by their arguments.

  • What reasons do the Durants give for the success of Methodist preaching among the English poor?
  • How did the revival's effects on drink, family life and charity compare with those of the deists' arguments?
  • What did Wesley's insistence on holiness of life require of converts?

• Providence after the Lisbon earthquake

  The earthquake of 1 November 1755 destroyed much of Lisbon and provoked Voltaire's poem against the optimism of Pope and Leibniz. The episode sets an ancient question in an eighteenth-century frame: how can a good God permit such suffering? Students should state the optimists' case, Voltaire's objection and a Christian answer drawn from Scripture before weighing them.

  • What did Pope mean by 'whatever is, is right,' and why did the Lisbon disaster make Voltaire reject it?
  • How does the book of Job answer the question the earthquake raised?
  • Did the philosophers or the preachers of the 1750s offer the more honest response to Lisbon?

Context

The Age of Voltaire was published in 1965, in a decade of rapid secularization in Western Europe and of debate in the United States over religion in public life and schools. The Durants, long-standing secular humanists with a respect for religion's moral role, wrote of an earlier century in which educated Europeans argued about revelation, toleration and Providence, and the volume's subtitle reflects their interest in that debate. The book belongs to the late phase of the series, after Ariel Durant became a credited co-author.

Composition

Published by Simon & Schuster in 1965 as Volume IX of The Story of Civilization, following The Age of Louis XIV (1963) and preceding Rousseau and Revolution (1967), the volume that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968. Will and Ariel Durant are named jointly on the title page. The book was reissued as a Simon & Schuster ebook in 2011.

Reception

The volume sold widely and was praised for its portraits and its readable treatment of eighteenth-century culture. Specialists have viewed it, like the other late volumes, as a synthesis of older scholarship; the Durants' strong sympathy for Voltaire and their conflict-centered reading of the period have been balanced by later historians who stress the religious Enlightenment and the many devout participants in the century's science and learning.

Comparisons

• Candide: Or Optimism

  Candide (1759) appeared just after the volume's end date but grew from the Lisbon earthquake and the optimism debate the Durants describe at its close; the tale shows how Voltaire turned that argument into comedy.

• Persian Letters

  Montesquieu's 1721 satire, in which Persian visitors observe Regency Paris, is a primary witness to the society described in the volume's opening French chapters.

• The Spirit of the Laws

  The Durants present Montesquieu's 1748 treatise as a founding work of political science; reading its chapters on climate, the separation of powers and England tests their summary.

• An Essay on Man

  Pope's philosophical poem states the optimism that Voltaire attacked after Lisbon, and it shows students the argument in its own couplets rather than through the Durants' paraphrase.

• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

  Hume's essay on miracles, central to the volume's account of philosophy's challenge to revelation, appears in this book, so students can weigh his argument directly.

• Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick

  Wesley's sermons and his household medical manual give the evangelical revival its own voice and show a preacher concerned with both souls and bodies of the poor.

• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

  Fielding's 1749 novel offers the English society of the Walpole chapters seen from the road and the inn, with comic judgments on clergy, squires and philosophers that complement the Durants' survey.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The subtitle's emphasis. Keep a running list of every place the Durants describe religion and philosophy in conflict, and every place where the two appear together in one person.
• Voltaire's English exile. Note what he admired in England and how that admiration shaped his later campaigns in France.
• The Methodist chapters. Watch how the Durants describe Wesley's preaching, the response of the crowds and the opposition of the clergy.
• Bach and Handel. Ask why the authors give so much space to religious music in a book about the challenge to religion.
• The scientific chapters. Notice how many of the scientists named were believers and how the authors treat their faith.

Key terms and names

Regency

The government of France by Philippe d'Orléans (1715-1723) during the minority of Louis XV.

Deism

Belief in a Creator known by reason who does not intervene through miracle or special revelation, held by several English and French writers of the period.

Methodism

The movement of disciplined piety and open-air evangelism led by John and Charles Wesley within, and later beside, the Church of England.

Salon

A gathering of writers and thinkers in a private Paris house, usually presided over by a hostess, where ideas were debated.

Encyclopédie

The great French reference work edited by Diderot and d'Alembert from 1751, which spread the ideas of the philosophes.

Optimism

In this period, the philosophical doctrine of Leibniz and Pope that the actual world is the best possible one.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What years does the volume cover, and what events mark its opening and its close?
2. Comprehension Why was Voltaire sent to England, and what did he write about it afterward?
3. Comprehension Where and to whom did John Wesley and George Whitefield preach in the open air?
4. Interpretation Why do the Durants name the age for Voltaire rather than for Frederick, Bach or Wesley, and what does that choice reveal about their view of the century?
5. Interpretation How do the Durants weigh Voltaire's defense of the persecuted against his attacks on Christianity itself?
6. Interpretation According to the authors, what did the English deists and Hume contribute to the challenge to revealed religion, and how did defenders such as Butler reply?
7. Big Question In the same decades, Hume wrote against miracles and Wesley saw drunkards reformed. Which kind of evidence should weigh more in judging the truth of Christianity, and why?

Faith Connections

• Job 38:1-11 (Scripture)

  God's answer from the whirlwind addresses suffering without offering the tidy optimism Voltaire mocked after Lisbon, and gives students a scriptural response to the earthquake debate at the end of the volume.

• Luke 13:1-5 (Scripture)

  Jesus refuses to treat the victims of the tower of Siloam as worse sinners than others and calls his hearers to repentance, which bears directly on the sermons and pamphlets that interpreted Lisbon as divine punishment.

• Augustine, Enchiridion 11 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's argument that God would not permit evil unless he could bring good out of it is the older Christian position that eighteenth-century optimism simplified and that Voltaire attacked.

• Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (1736) (Great Conversation)

  Butler's careful reply to the deists, which the Durants mention among the defenders of revelation, shows that the philosophical challenge of the age was met by Christian argument and not only by revival.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Between 1715 and 1756 the culture of Western Europe was shaped by a contest between inherited Christianity and a philosophy grounded in reason, science and the English example of toleration; Voltaire, more than any other figure, carried that philosophy to a wide public; religion retained great vitality in Bach, the evangelical revival and popular piety; but the deists, Hume, Montesquieu and the French materialists so undermined the authority of revelation among the educated that the stage was set for the Encyclopédie, Rousseau and the Revolution.

Rhetorical device: biographical interweaving. Instead of giving Voltaire a single chapter, the Durants thread episodes of his life through the French narrative and return to him in the philosophical chapters, so that one life becomes the thread on which the whole period's story is hung.

Debate: Resolved: The Durants are right to describe the years 1715-1756 chiefly as a conflict between religion and philosophy.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Both Voltaire and Wesley spent their lives trying to change the conduct of their contemporaries. Using the Durants' accounts of each, argue which man did more good for the poor of his country, and on what standard you judge.

Comparison with Candide: Or Optimism: Read the chapters of Candide set in Lisbon and compare their treatment of the earthquake with the Durants' account of the optimism debate. Argue whether Voltaire answers the optimists fairly or only ridicules them.

Medical Lens

The scientific chapters include a survey of eighteenth-century medicine: the teaching of Boerhaave at Leiden, advances in physiology, and the introduction of smallpox inoculation to England through Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a practice Voltaire publicly recommended. The plague at Marseille in 1720 falls within the period. In England the gin trade and its effects on the urban poor, recorded in Hogarth's prints and in legislation of the 1730s and 1750s, are a chapter in the history of alcohol and public health. La Mettrie's materialist account of man as a machine, written by a physician, belongs to the philosophical debate about mind and body. Swift's endowment of a hospital for the insane in Dublin and his own decline in old age are part of his biography; any diagnosis of his final illness is a retrospective reading. Locators are by subject, and claims should be checked against histories of medicine before citation.

• Closing part, chapter on medicine in the scientific advance

  Boerhaave and Leiden teaching, physiology, and smallpox inoculation brought to England from Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

  Physicians Doctors Plague Epidemic Public Health Sanitation
• English book, chapters on social conditions and on Hogarth

  Gin drinking among the London poor, its social costs, and parliamentary attempts to restrain the trade.

  Alcohol Public Health Sanitation
• French materialists, account of La Mettrie

  A physician-philosopher's argument that thought depends wholly on bodily organization, and the scandal it caused.

  Mind Body Physicians Doctors
• English book, account of Swift's last years

  Swift's bequest for a Dublin hospital for the mentally ill and the failing of his own mind before his death in 1745.

  Asylum Institution Dementia Memory

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1739 between John Wesley and a deist gentleman who meet at an inn near Bristol, each explaining what he thinks the colliers outside most need.

• Essay

  The Durants frame the century as a conflict between religion and philosophy. Choose Bach, Wesley or Émilie du Châtelet and argue whether that person's life supports or complicates the frame.

• Classroom

  Create a timeline from 1715 to 1756 in two colors, one for works of faith (cantatas, sermons, hymns) and one for works of skepticism (deist tracts, Hume, the Encyclopédie), and discuss what the overlap shows.

• Fiction

  Tell the story of a Lisbon apothecary on the morning of 1 November 1755 and in the weeks after, drawing on the volume's account of the earthquake and the arguments it set off.

Further Reading

• Letters on the English, Voltaire

• The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay

• The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker

• Voltaire, Theodore Besterman

• The Journal of John Wesley, John Wesley

• The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin