Book: The Life of Voltaire

Overview

Evelyn Beatrice Hall presents a lively, sympathetic portrait of François‑Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire. The narrative traces the rise of a brilliant, combative writer whose wit and pen shaped eighteenth‑century thought and public life. Hall balances account of public controversies with intimate detail, drawing a picture of a man as playful and petulant as he was principled.
The biography emphasizes continuity between personality and politics: Voltaire's relentless satire and irreverence are shown as tools he used to combat what he saw as superstition, injustice, and authoritarian power. Hall writes with admiration for Voltaire's clarity and moral indignation while not shying away from his contradictions and compromises.

Early Life and Formation

Born into a middle‑class Parisian family, Voltaire received a classical education that honed his facility for language and argument. His early years reveal a precocious talent for satire and a taste for controversy that quickly ran afoul of authorities. Early brushes with censorship and imprisonment underlined the adversarial relationship between his temperament and the institutions of his time.
Hall traces how experiences in the legal, literary, and courtly worlds shaped a cosmopolitan outlook. Time spent in England proved pivotal: exposure to English science, politics, and religious toleration broadened his mind and provided comparative material that would inform his later critiques of French intolerance.

Exile, Paris, and Literary Career

Periods of exile and return recur throughout Voltaire's life, each exile sharpening his satire and expanding his audience. Hall recounts his productive stays at Cirey with Émilie du Châtelet, where scientific and literary labors flourished, and his later years at Ferney, from which he projected influence across Europe. The book follows the arc from early plays and poems to celebrated polemical works and historical writings.
Hall highlights major works such as the Lettres philosophiques, Candide, and his histories, explaining how they combined elegance, humor, and a moral thrust. Voltaire's ability to turn complex debates into readable, biting prose made him a public intellectual whose voice resonated far beyond literary salons.

Ideas, Style, and Methods

Voltaire's creed, as Hall portrays it, is a pragmatic, anti‑dogmatic faith in reason, toleration, and the improvement of human affairs. He favored empirical science and intellectual liberty, often wrapped in aphorism and epigram. Hall shows how his stylistic gifts, clarity, irony, and dramatic timing, served his philosophical aims, making subtle arguments accessible and memorable.
The biography stresses Voltaire's use of letters, anecdotes, and pamphlets as instruments of persuasion. His correspondence becomes a political and literary medium, enabling him to intervene in legal cases, shape public opinion, and cultivate influential patrons.

Controversies and Personal Life

Hall does not sanitize Voltaire's personal contradictions: his occasional vanity, his flirtations with privilege, and his complicated friendships with powerful rulers are all chronicled. His alliances with figures such as Frederick the Great and his conflicts with the Church and judiciary demonstrate both strategic calculation and stubborn principle.
Episodes like the Calas affair receive attention as emblematic of Voltaire's campaign against judicial injustice. Hall portrays him as relentless in pursuing individual cases that illustrated larger injustices, often turning single tragedies into causes celebres that revealed systemic wrongs.

Legacy and Assessment

Voltaire emerges from Hall's pages as a founder of the modern public sphere: a writer who turned eloquence into a civic instrument. His influence on subsequent debates about toleration, civil rights, and freedom of thought is presented as profound and enduring. At the same time, Hall acknowledges limits, his elitism, occasional inconsistencies, and the gaps between rhetoric and practice.
The account closes by situating Voltaire within the broader Enlightenment, crediting him with popularizing its ideas and shaping an intellectual climate that valued inquiry over dogma. Hall's portrait leaves a vivid sense of a man whose wit remained a weapon against oppression and whose prose helped reconfigure European sensibilities.