Volume 14, Number 12 · June 18, 1970
Cultivating Voltaire
By John Weightman
Voltaire
by Theodore Besterman
Harcourt, Brace & World, 637 pp., $12.50
The Intellectual Development of Voltaire
by Ira O. Wade
Princeton, 828 pp., $20.00
Voltaire was undoubtedly a very great man, and being the outstanding representative of the most widely respected national culture of his time, he dominated the atmosphere of eighteenth-century Europe in a way that is almost unimaginable today. The postwar apotheosis of Winston Churchill, statesman, writer, soldier, aviator, bricklayer, and painter, with a long career of fame and notoriety behind him, can perhaps give some idea of the remarkable prestige of the extraordinary Frenchman. Voltaire was probably the first private individual—that is, someone not a hereditary ruler, politician, or religious leader—ever to become such a social force. His celebrity increased as he grew older until, on his return to Paris in his eighty-fourth year after a long exile, he was given a hysterical welcome such as had never been accorded to anyone before, and has possibly only been equaled since by General de Gaulle's triumphant reentry after the Liberation.
Review, 4700 words
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