Book: The Friends of Voltaire

Overview

Evelyn Beatrice Hall's The Friends of Voltaire (1906) is a sympathetic portrait of ten people whose lives intersected with Voltaire's and who, by their loyalty and courage, helped sustain the ideas of the Enlightenment. Rather than offering a conventional life of Voltaire, the book illuminates his character indirectly by profiling those who supported, sheltered, debated with, and defended him. The result is a mosaic of personalities, patrons, correspondents, fellow intellectuals, and public figures, whose stories together sketch the social world in which Voltaire lived and worked.
Hall wrote under the name S. G. Tallentyre, and her aim is evident in the tellerly, anecdotal manner she adopts. The sketches are compact, often hinged on letters, memorable incidents, and moments of crisis that reveal both human warmth and the political pressures of eighteenth-century France. Hall uses these intimate portraits to argue that Voltaire's influence rested as much on personal alliances and moral courage as on his literary genius.

Contents and Structure

The book is organized as ten discrete sketches, each devoted to a different friend or defender of Voltaire. Each chapter functions as a short biography, blending narrative episodes with quotations and commentary that highlight the subject's relationship to Voltaire and to the larger controversies of the time. Rather than an exhaustive archival study, the structure encourages comparisons across lives, so readers see recurring themes of exile, censorship, friendship, and solidarity.
Hall selects episodes that dramatize loyalty and conflict: interventions to secure publications, legal and social protections, correspondence that clarifies beliefs, and public stands against ecclesiastical and governmental oppression. The vignettes are compact and often theatrical, designed to engage the reader and to make complex political and intellectual struggles accessible.

Themes and Approach

Friendship and courage are central themes. Hall emphasizes how personal bonds enabled the circulation of ideas under conditions of repression, showing that intellectual history is made as much through networks of support as through isolated genius. She foregrounds the risks taken by friends who defended controversial speech, and she underscores the moral character of those who stood with Voltaire when prosecution, exile, or social opprobrium threatened.
A second theme is the humanization of famous figures. Hall resists purely heroic or monstrous readings of Voltaire by portraying him through the responses he provoked in others: admiration, amusement, irritation, and protective devotion. Her approach is moral and didactic in a Victorian key, using biography as a vehicle for arguing that courage in defense of free expression is both noble and necessary.

Style and Reception

Hall's prose is brisk, anecdotal, and designed for a general readership rather than specialists. The tone is admiring and often aphoristic; the book's memorable phrasing includes the now-famous paraphrase, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, " a sentence often misattributed to Voltaire but actually Hall's concise summation of his attitude toward free speech.
Contemporary readers applauded the book's readability and moral clarity. Scholars have since noted its hagiographic tendencies and limited engagement with archival scholarship, but its narrative charm and moral force ensured popularity and lasting influence on the popular image of Voltaire and his milieu.

Legacy

The Friends of Voltaire helped popularize an image of Voltaire as a thinker defended by a loyal circle and as a symbol of the fight for liberty of thought. Its emphasis on the social bonds that sustain dissent remains a useful corrective to biographies that isolate intellectual achievement from its human supports. While not a work of professional historiography, Hall's book endures as an empathetic introduction to Voltaire's world and to the moral stakes of defending free expression.