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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• French materialists, account of La Mettrie

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

• 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.