The Age of Voltaire

The Story of Civilization #9

by Will Durant, Ariel Durant

The Age of Voltaire (Volume 9): A biography of a great man and the period he embodied. We witness Voltaire's satiric work in the salons and the theater as well as his banishment to England. With him we view the complex relationships between nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie and peasantry in the France of Louis XV. We explore the music of Bach and the struggle between Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa of Austria. And finally we hear an imaginary discussion between Voltaire and Pope Benedict XIV on the significance and value of religion.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, World History, Religion, France, Reference

898 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for his book, The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which was considered "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Of all the audacities of science the most daring is the attempt to fling its measuring rods around the stars, to subject those scintillating beauties to nocturnal spying, to analyze their constituents across a billion miles, and to confine their motions to man-made logic and laws. Mind and the heavens are the poles of our wonder and study, and the greatest wonder is mind legislating for the firmament."
- Will Durant, The Age of Voltaire



Volume 9 of Durant's Story of Civilization focuses on the period of the Age of Enlightenment surrounding Voltaire. It primarily deals with the philosophy, religion, arts, wars, science and politics of the period between 1715 and 1756 in France, Britain, and Germany. I gave it five stars because so many interesting people, philosophy, and ideas can be found in this period. One difficulty with this volume was it lead me to buy, in reverse order:

1. Rameau's Nephew / D'Alembert's Dream
2. Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
3. Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction
4. Joseph Andrews / Shamela
5. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
6. Selected Letters by Mary Montagu
7. Selected Letters by Horace Walpole
8. Lord Chesterfield's Letters
9. Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1691-1709: Presented to the King
10. Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1710-1715: The Bastards Triumphant
11. Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, 1715-1723: Fatal Weakness
12. Political Writings by Pierre Bayle
13. Various Thoughts on Occasion of a Comet by Pierre Bayle

So, I guess this is a new way for me to judge a history book. How many new books does it directly inspire me to worm into my library? I also now own some French coins of Pierre Bayle, Roger Bacon, Voltaire, and Montaigne, but that is a whole other French rabbit hole caused primarily by my last couple weeks floating in Volume 9.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book. Durant still doesn't appear tired of his subject. This is his third book related to the enlightenment and the only soft part of it (and it's probably more experimental than soft) is the last chapter's dialogue between Voltaire and Pope Benedict. It was good, but a bit too abstract for a Universal History. But I love it, so like all my loves, I will overlook its small faults because I hope for my own to disappear in time.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not wish to belittle reason, but it should be the servant of love, not of pride

With this volume we reach the third chapter in the Age of Reason, culminating in the figure of Voltaire, who died a decade before the French Revolution.

The Age of Voltaire is somewhat different from the preceding volumes in that it isn’t simply a narrative history of Europe during a given time period, divided by country and topic, but instead structures itself around the life of one man: Voltaire. This proves to be an excellent organizational principle, since Voltaire touched nearly every aspect of life during that busy age.

Voltaire grows up during the regency, after the death of Louis XIV but when Louis XIV was too young to govern, a time of economic boom and bust. Voltaire writes some plays, poems, and satires, all with much wit and little wisdom, and ends up in the Bastille. Though shut up, he doesn’t shut up. Eventually the French authorities tire of the impish scribbler and banish him to England.

There, Voltaire learns the language and explores the little island. He has mixed feelings about Shakespeare but idolizes English liberties. While in England, Durant introduces us to Alexander Pope, who thinks that all partial evil is universal good, despite his curved spine; Henry Fielding, who writes of picaresque foundlings and founds the London police; and Handel, whose hallelujah still brings us good tidings of great joy. We also meet David Hume, who proves that nothing causes anything and that nobody exists; but despite these limitations, people have an innate moral sense that causes them to act virtuously.

After that, Voltaire moves back to France. As usual, he writes satires with too much fire, and flees from Paris to settle down with his famous paramour, Émilie du Châtelet, who translates Newton while Voltaire attempts to be a scientist. The translation succeeds, the experiments in both science and love fail, and Voltaire eventually moves on to Prussia on the invitation of Frederick the Great.

Durant takes this opportunity to cover the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who is neither witty nor fashionable, and consequently not famous during his lifetime, but whose works will nevertheless survive long after Voltaire’s vanish. Johann Sebastian's son Carl Philipp Emanuel has more success, and finds his way to the court of Frederick the Great, who plays at playing the flute. Frederick, for his part, is philosopher enough to be a skeptic, skeptical enough to be a cynic, and cynical enough to be an effective king.

Voltaire, like always, writes more sharply than he thinks, and loses his welcome at Frederick’s court. He eventually decides to move to Geneva and cultivate his garden.

Durant here pauses the narrative to give us an overview of the advances in science and mathematics during this time. Three people claim to “discover” oxygen, Scheele, Priestley, and Lavoisier, although it seems unfair that they get the credit, since our bodies discovered oxygen long before our minds caught up. Euler, Lagrange, and d’Alembert analyze, formulate, and discombobulate, and Laplace describes the system of the world while helping to develop the metric system. Volta and Benjamin Franklin make some shocking discoveries, Lamark solves the mystery of the giraffe’s neck, and Linnaeus helps with Voltaire’s garden by giving flowers their Latin names.

From there, Durant leads us to the philosophes. These are the French intellectuals, not necessarily philosophers in the strict sense, who attempt to reform the world with reason. They are not academics but public intellectuals, who write with grace and charm. Many write against Christianity; most philosophes are deists or atheists. The outstanding work of the philosophes is the Encyclopédie, a massive attempt to systematize and rationalize our understanding of the world. Diderot, the editor of this project, is the most important of this crowd after Voltaire, although there are many others: d’Holbach, d’Alembert, Helvétius, Grimm, and La Mettrie, who thinks men are just fancy machines.

Durant is particularly drawn to the conflict between reason and religion; he thinks it is the defining struggle of our age. He rehearses the arguments for and against religion to exhaustion, and even appends an imaginary dialogue between Pope Benedict XIV and Voltaire to examine the argument once more.

As usual, Durant shows himself a sloppy and unoriginal thinker when he ventures to put forward his own theories. He seems to know this, which is probably why he hides his opinions in side-remarks and an imaginary dialogue. As far as can be gleaned from these comments and this dialogue, Durant thinks that the most compelling case for religion is its ability to scare the populace into acting morally and accepting the social order. Personally I have serious doubts that religion improves morals; and besides it seems tremendously condescending to believe that most people need supernatural terrors in order to do the right thing.

In any case, as a history of Voltaire’s life and his times, this book is excellent, one of the strongest books in the series. Durant may not be much of a thinker, but he can certainly write.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Voltaire, oh Voltaire, how I love thee, let me count the ways...

Quotes:
" Proboty and honesty are chimeras with which people deck themselves, but which have no existence. ...

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."...

In satirizing the Royal Regent: "When Philippe reduced by a half the horses in the royal stables, Arouet(Voltaire) quipped that he would have done better to dismiss half the asses that crowded his Highness’s court."

Rebel, yes; Satirist, for sure; Social justice warrior, supreme; Theist, surprisingly! Actually, he regarded himself as a Deist.

“I may not believe that noses were made as convenient bridges for spectacles, but I am convinced that they were made to smell with". ...

When a young author knocked at the door of Les Délices (1757), and introduced himself to Voltaire as “a young atheist ready to serve” him, Voltaire replied, “And I have the honor to be a deist employer; but though our professions are so opposed, I will give you supper today and work tomorrow; I can make use of your arms, though not of your head."

Quote: In conclusion the poet invites Uranie to make up her own mind on religion, in full trust that God, who “has placed natural religion in your heart, will not resent a simple and candid spirit. Believe that before his throne, in all times, in all places, the soul of the just man is precious; believe that the modest Buddhist monk, the kindly Moslem dervish, find more grace in his eyes than a pitiless [predestinarian] Jansenist or an ambitious pope.”

If you haven't visited Wikipedia yet, here it is:
François-Marie Arouet(1694 - 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, , to be replaced byand his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state.

In fact, like Hume and Gibbon, Voltaire believed in exposing superstition, rejecting supernatural explanations, and identifying progress with the development of knowledge, manners, and arts.

That's not all he had to say about the 17th century churches and plutocracy. Aristocracy was on its way out. Money replaced birth as a title to power. The vultures moved in. The rest of France suffered. Voltaire was in vogue. He understood.

The European society was as vibrant as it was volatile at the time. Thanks to Martin Luther(1483 - 1546), an unusual birth rate existed. A German jurist thought that the increase in northern Europe was largely due to the transfer of monks and nuns from celibacy to parentage by the Protestant Reformation, and urged that “a statue be erected to Luther as the preserver of the species”.

Seriously, there was more to it than that: improvements in agriculture and transport, augmenting the supply and distribution of food, and advances in sanitation and medical treatment reducing the death rate in infants and adults.

Nevertheless, Voltaire, as we already know, was a tour de force. Mmmm, really? His opponents thought "he was a scroundel, wallowing in 'the dirtiest sink of freethinking."

Jacob Nicolas Moreau’s satire, Nouveau Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire des cacouacs (1757). The Cacouacs, said Moreau, were a species of barely human animals who carried a pouch of poison under their tongues; when they spoke, this venom mingled with their words and polluted all the surrounding air.

He called them atheists, anarchists, immoralists, egoists; but it was the term cacouac that pained them most keenly; it suggested the cacophony of quacking ducks, the bedlam of insane prattlers, sometimes (as the word intended) the odor of latrines. Voltaire struggled to reply, but who can refute a smell?

He was a relatively peaceful rebellion until the age of 57, when, lo and behold, an earthquake hit Portugal and North Africa. Thirty thousand people died. Thirty churches and numerous homes were destroyed.

A Portuguese Jesuit, Malagrida, explained that the quake, and the calamitous tidal wave that had followed it, were God's punishment for the vice that had prospored in Lisbon...

Why had so many holy priests and dedicated nuns perished in the quake and confligration? The Moslems would have hailed the catastrophe as Allah's revenge upon the Portugues Inquisition, but the quake had destroyed Mosque of Al-Mansur in Rabat. Some Protestant dominees in London ascribed the disaster to divine reprobation of Catholic crimes against humanity; but in the same year, November 19, an earthquake damaged fifteen hundred houses in Boston, Massachusetts, home of the Pilgrims and the Puritans. William Warburton announced that the massacre in Lisbon 'displayed God's Glory in its fairest colors'. John Wesley preached a sermon on 'The Cause and Cure of Earthquakes'; 'sin' he said, 'is the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural causes may be;... they are the effect of that curse which was brought upon the earth by the original transgression of Adam and Eve'.

You will have to read this unbelievably well-researched and meticulously detailed work to experience Voltaire's lividness. Voltaire's war was on.

Candide was eventually the big result. His most perfect production, the world thought, although Voltaire denied authorship. He had better occupations than write a pack of nonsense like that he declared. Well, he did use more than 100 speudonyms to get his message out. His followers and admirers, most of France, and soon the rest of the world, thought differently. "Here was that deceptively simple, smoothly flowing, lightly prancing, impishly ironic prose that only he could write; here and there a little obscenity, a little scatology; everywhere a playful, darting, lethal irreverence; if the style is the man, this had to be Voltaire."

Voltaire had managed to put into small compass, within the frame of a story of adventure and love, a telling satire of Leibniz’ theodicy, Pope’s optimism, religious abuses, monastic amours, class prejudices, political corruption, legal chicanery, judicial venality, the barbarity of the penal code, the injustice of slavery, and the destructiveness of war; Candide was composed while the Seven Years’ War dragged through its hither and thither of victory, devastation, and death. Flaubert called Voltaire’s masterpiece “le” résumé de toutes ses oeuvres,” the summary of all his works. It had the defect of most satires, absurd exaggeration; but Voltaire knew quite well that few men ever encounter so bitter a concatenation of catastrophes as Candide’s.

Voltaire is without question the most brilliant writer that ever lived. Was he second in every field, as Diderot charged? Second in philosophy to Diderot, yes, and in drama to Corneille and Racine; but he was first and best in his time in his conception and writing of history, in the grace of his poetry, in the charm and wit of his prose, in the range of his thought and his influence. His spirit moved like a flame over the continent and the century, and stirs a million souls in every generation. ...

Perhaps he hated too much, but we must remember the provocation; we must imagine ourselves back in an age when men were burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel, for deviating from orthodoxy...

...Jean Calas was one of a small group of Huguenots—Calvinist Protestants—left in Toulouse after a century of persecution, confiscation of property, and compulsory conversion to Catholicism

The law of France not only excluded Protestants from public office, it declared them ineligible to be lawyers, or physicians, or apothecaries, or midwives, or booksellers, or goldsmiths, or grocers. If they had not been baptized they had no civil rights whatever. If they had not been married by a Catholic priest they were held to be living in concubinage, and their children were accounted illegitimate. ...

Suffice to say, this ninth volume of author and sociologist, Will Durant's "(The Story of Civilization) " - series, was one of the best books I have ever read on Voltaire's life and times. It was THIS VIDEO that had me find the author's writings, and in particular his immaculate research on Voltaire.

There is much of Voltaire in Christopher Hitchens, and probably a large dollop in Mark Twain's rebellion against the establishment. Needless to say, I LOVE LOVE LOVE their work. Ok, I confess, I not only adore their work, I'm a free speech rebel myself. And satire is my beat. Sarcastic satire is even better :-)

And yes, Voltaire, actually DID say: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - just a little bit differently. You get the drift though.

I rest my case. I hope I provided enough reasons for you to love Voltaire as well. This book is an absolute MUST-READ for all Voltaire groupies :-) Oh yes, and for those who don't know where freedom of speech originated from.

[Helga چـو ایـران نباشد تن من مـباد · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subject of this volume is the pervasive and continuing conflict between religion, science and philosophy in the eighteenth century Europe.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning achievement of erudition, intellectual sympathy, and skepticism (the latter always tempered by unparalleled moderation). I cannot recommend this more heartily, and am only sad that I will not be reading its sequel (Rousseau and Revolution) for a while, as I want to fill in some of the gaps that this book has raised in my 1715-56 reading life (which is pretty much everything from 1715-56, tbh)...

While reading, I had the distinct impression that he favoured the history of music somewhat over the history of the novel, and in terms of pages this was true enough, but my feeling that he focused much more on France than on England is a false one if you extract the 200 or so pages that close the volume which focus upon the attack upon Christianity by the French Philosophes (Voltaire, Diderot, et al), which the subtitle to this volume does warn us is a "special emphasis" here.

Again, to be honest, I find that military history (you know, those endless battles and interchangeable Seventy-times-nine-years Wars of the Blah-blah Succession...) to be both wearisome and vertiginous, and Durant, concerned with Civilization in all that that term implies, only gives us small doses of the battlefield, for which I am eternally grateful.

But seriously, if there is one book to rule them all in terms of panoptic/synoptic history, this might be it. Each section (be that on the novel, the life of the salons, or even geodesy [no, I did not know what that meant before, and have almost forgotten it now as I type this]) leaves you wanting more*, and that can never be a bad thing.

*If you know me at all, then you know that I always want more political economy, and the sections on the South Sea Bubble (England, 1720) and the collapse of Lord's Systeme in France (also 1720?) amounted to no more than petits amuse-bouches (sp?) for me, alas!

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with the previous volumes of the Durants’ Story of Civilization, since I can add little to their own insights, I will let them speak for themselves.


History and Society
- When we cease to honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of freedom.
- echoing Plato across two thousand years, democracy falls into chaos, invites dictatorship, and disappears.
- to ignore history would be to endlessly repeat its errors, massacres, and crimes. There are three avenues to that large and tolerant perspective which is philosophy: one is the study of men in life through experience; another, the study of things in space through science; a third, the study of events in time through history.
- The instinct to persecute passed from religion to politics as the state replaced the Church as the guardian of unanimity and order and as the object of heretical dissent.
- Aristocracy was passing into plutocracy; money was replacing birth as a title to power.
- We must remind ourselves that nearly all democracies are oligarchies; minorities can be organized for action and power, majorities cannot.
- the question whether a moral code unsupported by religion could maintain social order remained unsolved. It is still with us; we live in that critical experiment.
- Most “great men,” [Joseph] Fielding held, had done more harm than good to mankind; so Alexander was called “the Great” because, after “he had with fire and sword overrun a vast empire, had destroyed the lives of an immense number of innocent wretches, had scattered ruin and desolation like a whirlwind, we are told, as an act of his clemency, that he did not cut the throat of an old woman and ravish her daughters.”

England
- Voltaire the businessman liked the practicality of the English, their respect for facts, reality, utility, their simplicity of manners, habits, and dress even in opulence. Above all he liked the English middle class. He compared the English with their beer: froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent.
- France had almost destroyed itself to compel all Frenchmen to one faith; Voltaire dilated on the comparative toleration of religious differences in England. “This is a land of sects. An Englishman, like a free man, goes to heaven by whatever route he chooses.”
- Some mild protests were raised against the severity of the penal code. Johnson, no sentimentalist, pointed out in 1751 the danger in making so many crimes capital: “To equal robbery with murder is to … incite the commission of a greater crime to prevent the detection of a less.”
- In 1689 there had been fifty [crimes punishable by death]; by 1820 there were 160. Murder, treason, counterfeiting, arson, rape, sodomy, piracy, armed smuggling, forgery, destroying ships or setting them on fire, bankruptcy with concealment of assets, highway robbery, housebreaking, burglary of over forty shillings, shoplifting above five shillings, maiming or stealing cattle, shooting at a revenue officer, cutting down trees in an avenue or a park, setting fire to a cornfield, sending threatening letters, concealing the death of a husband or a child, taking part in a riot, shooting a rabbit, demolishing a turnpike gate, escaping from jail, committing sacrilege—all of these, and a hundred more, were, under the first three Georges, capital crimes.
- “No man,” said Samuel Johnson, “will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.… The man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”
- Voltaire later summed up the debt in a letter to Helvétius: We have borrowed, from the English, annuities, … sinking funds, the construction and maneuvering of ships, the laws of gravitation, … the seven primary colors, and inoculation. Imperceptibly we shall acquire from them their noble freedom of thought, and their profound contempt for the petty trifling of the schools.

Philosophy
- philosophy, which is the quest of wisdom, must build upon science, which is the pursuit of knowledge.
- The debate that agitated the intellectual classes in the half century before the [French] Revolution was not quite a conflict between religion and philosophy; it was primarily a conflict between the philosophes and Catholic Christianity as it then existed in France. It was the pent-up wrath of the French mind after centuries in which religion had sullied its services with obscurantism, persecution, and massacre.
- Hatred grew tense on both sides of the conflict between religion and philosophy; what had begun as a campaign against superstition rose to the pitch of a war against Christianity. Revolution came in France, and not in eighteenth-century England, partly because censorship by state or Church, which was mild in England, was so strong in France that the imprisoned mind could expand only by the violent destruction of its bonds.
- [Lord Bolingbroke: Letters on the Study and Use of History (1735):] “History is philosophy teaching by examples.”

Religion
- when a religion consents to reason it begins to die.
- Look at any really religious person, and you will find an inner conviction, not an intellectual conclusion. For the simple soul faith must be an accepted tradition; for the mature spirit it must be a direct feeling of a supernatural reality.
- Heaven and utopia are the rival buckets that hover over the well of fate: when one goes down the other goes up; hope draws up one or the other in turn. Perhaps when both buckets come up empty a civilization loses heart and begins to die.
- the rival religions—Calvinist and Catholic-gave the worst example of behavior, for they liberated hatred and chained the mind.
- Meditative men, lazy men, men shrinking from the challenges and responsibilities of life, crept into monasteries and infected one another with neurotic dreams of women, devils, and gods. Learned councils assembled to debate whether one absurdity or another should become part of the infallible creed.
- We can accept a hundred legends as profound symbols or illuminating allegories, because we are no longer required to accept their literal truth. We have learned to sympathize with that which we once loved and had to leave, as we retain a tender memory for the loves of our youth. And to whom, more than to any other one man, do we owe this precious and epochal liberation? To Voltaire.
- We can feel the power and splendor of the Old Testament, the beauty and elevation of the New, because we are free to think of them as the labor and inspiration of fallible men. We can be grateful for the ethics of Christ, because he no longer threatens us with hell, nor curses the men and cities that will not hear him.
- Man could at last liberate himself from medieval dogmas and Oriental myths; he could shrug off that bewildering, terrifying theology, and stand up free, free to doubt, to inquire, to think, to gather knowledge and spread it, free to build a new religion around the altar of reason and the service of mankind.
- There may be some good in religion, but an intelligent man does not need it as a support to morality; too often, in history, it has been used by priests to bemuse the public mind while kings picked the public pocket.
- Two priesthoods came into conflict: the one devoted to the molding of character through religion, the other to the education of the intellect through science. The first priesthood predominates in ages of poverty or disaster, when men are grateful for spiritual comfort and moral order; the second in ages of progressive wealth, when men incline to limit their hopes to the earth.
- The Reformation, though it sanctioned intolerance, generated so many sects (several of them strong enough to defend themselves) that intolerance seldom dared go beyond words.
The growth of toleration resulted chiefly from the decline of religious belief; it is easier to be tolerant when we are indifferent.
- It was a sign of the times that the Established Church had become broadly tolerant of different theologies and rituals among its members. Pitt described it as “a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy”—i.e., the official doctrine was predestinarian, the ritual was semi-Roman Catholic, but a Latitudinarian spirit allowed Anglican ministers to reject Calvin’s determinism and adopt the free-will teaching of the Dutch heretic Arminius.
- the decline of religious belief was begetting the pessimism that would be the secret malady of the modern soul.
- Nearly all ardent English Protestants were now in the sects dissenting from the Established Church. Voltaire laughed and rejoiced at their multiplicity: Independents (Puritans), Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Socinians (Unitarians). The Presbyterians, having lost political power, were becoming tolerant; they did not take predestination very seriously, and many of them were quietly content with a human Christ.

Voltaire
- [in Épître à Uranie] the poet invites Uranie to make up her own mind on religion, in full trust that God, who “has placed natural religion in your heart, will not resent a simple and candid spirit. Believe that before his throne, in all times, in all places, the soul of the just man is precious; believe that the modest Buddhist monk, the kindly Moslem dervish, find more grace in his eyes than a pitiless [predestinarian] Jansenist or an ambitious pope.”
- The mice that must be in some little holes of an immense building know not whether it is eternal, or who the architect is, or why he built it. Such mice are we; and the Divine Architect who built the universe has never, that I know of, told his secret to one of us…
- this Supreme Intelligence is known to us only in his existence, not in his nature. “Miserable mortal! If I cannot understand my own intelligence, if I cannot know by what I am animated, how can I have any acquaintance with that ineffable intelligence which visibly presides over the universe?
- He minimized the persecution of Christians by Rome, and anticipated Gibbon in reckoning this as far less frequent and murderous than the persecution of heretics by the Church.
- he knew that facts have sworn eternal enmity to generalizations; and perhaps he felt that any philosophy of history should follow and derive from, rather than precede and decide, the recital of events.
- He saw history rather as the slow and fumbling advance of man, through natural causes and human effort, from ignorance to knowledge, from miracles to science, from superstition to reason. He could see no Providential design in the maelstrom of events.
- He found much that he could accept in non-Christian religions, especially in Confucianism (which was not a religion); but very little in Christian theology pleased him. “I have two hundred volumes on this subject, and, what is worse, I have read them. It is like going the rounds of a lunatic asylum.”
- “Laws watch over known crimes, religion over secret crimes.”
- consider the various Christian interpretations of the Eucharist: the Catholics profess that they eat God and not bread, the Lutherans eat both God and bread, the Calvinists eat bread but not God
- He was a man at war [against religion], and a man cannot fight well unless he has learned to hate. Only the victor can appreciate his enemy.
- He declared that the Spanish Inquisition and the massacre of the heretical Albigenses were the vilest events in history.
- he made organized religion the villain in his story, since it seemed to him generally allied with obscurantism, given to oppression, and fomenting war.
- He mourned the diverse transmogrifications of the past by current prejudices; in this sense “history … is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.”
- “I have now gone through the immense scene of revolutions that the world has experienced since the time of Charlemagne; and to what have they tended? To desolation, and the loss of millions of lives! Every great event has been a capital misfortune. History has kept no account of times of peace and tranquility; it relates only ravages and disasters.… All history, in short, is little else than a long succession of useless cruelties….”

Diderot
- as in many cases, the Jesuits lost a novice by sharpening a mind. [Diderot] discovered that Paris had even more brothels than churches. He dropped his cassock and piety and became a lawyer’s apprentice.
- [He had] brown eyes heavy and sad, as if recalling unrecallable errors, or realizing the indestructibility of superstition, or noting the high birth rate of simplicity.
- Could anything be more absurd than a God who makes God die on the Cross in order to appease the anger of God against a woman and a man four thousand years dead?
- He had long since succumbed to the fascination of philosophy—which draws us ever onward because it never answers the questions that we never cease to ask.

d’Holbach
- “To say that the soul will feel, think, enjoy, and suffer after the death of the body is to pretend that a clock shivered into a thousand pieces will continue to strike the hour … and mark the progress of time.”
- The majestic order and regularity of the universe do not suggest to him any supreme intelligence; they are due to natural causes operating mechanically, and require no attribution to a deity who would himself be more inexplicable than the world.
- by concentrating human thought upon individual salvation in another world, Christianity deadened civic feeling in this one, leaving men insensitive to the misery of their fellows, and to the injustices committed by oppressive groups and governments.

Helvétius
- In order to love mankind we must expect little from them.… Every man, so long as his passions do not obscure his reason, will always be more indulgent in proportion as he is more enlightened.…
- When the individual is freed from these compulsions -- as in absolute rule, war, or a crowd -- he tends to revert to lawlessness and immorality; and in “most nations morality is now nothing more than a collection of the … precepts dictated by the powerful to secure their authority and to be unjust with impunity.”
- What does the history of religions teach us? That they have everywhere lighted up the torch of intolerance, strewed the plains with corpses, imbued the fields with blood, burned cities, and laid waste empires. … Are not the Turks, whose religion is a religion of blood, more tolerant than we? We see Christian churches at Constantinople, but there are no mosques in Paris.
- In every religion the first objective of the priests is to stifle the curiosity of men, to prevent the examination of every dogma whose absurdity is too palpable to be concealed.
- The power of the priest depends upon the superstitions and stupid credulity of the people. It is of little worth to him that they be learned; the less they know, the more docile they will be to his dictates.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific find at a used book sale. I have seen this at antique markets but the seller usually wants to unload a full set. This is old school history, as opposed to the revisionism peddled today. The section about Georgian London with all its highs and lows is especially compelling. Absolutely first rate, it's a shame that we don't see these great volumes in ePub format. Written in 1965. Just 13 reviews here while pure junk gets tens of thousands...oh well...UPDATE - I found this series on the Kobo site in Epub format, now reading the Louis XIV volume.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an age! When being the smartest person in the room could get you killed.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will and Ariel Durants' Story of Civilization series is unlike most histories in that they pay considerable attention to the lives of ordinary persons, and women, in addition to describing the political, cultural and scientific 'accomplishments' of great men. Will Durant is especially good in explicating the history of ideas as this volume demonstrates, primarily in the field of political philosophy.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a broad sweep of historical time periods in the area of the arts, philosophy, social movers-and-shakers you still can't beat the Durant's Story of Civilization series. It's what I wished my college education had been like. I knocked off one star for the repeated use of terms such as 'savage' to describe people who had been colonized and enslaved by the European powers of the times.

[Bev · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this series: however I've read so much history that I skipped things that are familiar, concentrating on the historical characters and their interaction. It is the story of western European history from the early 1700's to about 1750. Interesting to see how all the countries connected and what issues resulted in immigrating to America and other countries, especially I didn't know much about the smaller countries. Why was this called the age of Voltaire? He was a philosopher and the Durrants see this as a period when these countries threw off their religious beliefs and that Voltaire was a great influence in that. Previously countries picked one religion and governed by that. With so many beliefs governments expelled the ones they didn't like and ignored others. I love the detail. The books pack a lot of excitement in telling the stories.

[Keeko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The authors bring the 18th Century to life. It seems very much like our time because there are financial scandals and incredible scientific progress in the midst of wars and extreme poverty, and there's a lot of energy by people who are trying to make the world a better place. What I like best about the Durant books is the gentle humor and feeling of kindness. You can feel that they loved writing the books.

[James Violand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review applies to all Durant's History of Civilization. The author does not follow a strictly chronological approach, but emphasizes those events/personages that have developed our Western civilization. He tends to emphasize certain personalities - some of whom I take exception to - but he stresses those things which make Western man unique. The arts have a prominent place in developing our culture and Durant convinces the reader how important they are.

[Dovofthegalilee · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the past several volumes this one went down a lot smoother for me. Perhaps I'm getting giddy at the idea of getting near finishing this bohemeath! After this it will be Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

[Lou Chiaramonte, Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Durants do it (did it) again! Volume 9 of 11 in the 10,000 some-odd page Story of Civilization. If it wasn't for the audiobook format, I might still be on the first volume!

The myopic focus on France, Britain, and Germany in this volume is both a pity and a necessity. There simply wouldn't have been time for the Durants to focus on the development of philosophy and economics in these countries in any shorter space. That said, it is still a pity. All 'mainstream of history' studies run into this problem. At least the Durants acknowledged it as such.

--A more complete review to follow, if I ever get the time!

[Alberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent as usual. The epilogue (a dialogue between Voltaire and Pope Benedict) is one of the best written and most even-handed debates between conservatism and liberalism (what Thomas Sowell has dubbed the conflict between the constrained and unconstrained visions) I've ever read.

[Buddy Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I have two volumes remaining in the eleven-volume "The Story of Civilization," after which I'll review the set. Meanwhile I'll simply note that this has been one of the great reads of my life so far.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great leap forward in my understanding of the Age of Reason. Some of their asides are downright captivating. I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in understanding how the modern world was created,as long as they had an awful lot of free time on their hands.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The death of Louis XIV to the beginning of the Seven Year’s War was a time of change for Western Europe, especially in a growing conflict between faith and reason. The Age of Voltaire is the ninth volume of The Story of Civilization series by Will Durant and joined for the third time by his wife Ariel investigate the changing politics, cultural traits, and the face of sciences of the early modern era as well as the conflict between religion of philosophy.

While this volume isn’t a biography of Voltaire, the Durants used his life to focus on specific regions of Europe—mainly his native France, England, and greater Germany. Those regions are the focus of the first three books of the volume in which their political developments, their cultural accomplishments in the various arts, and the impacts they and Voltaire had on one another. The last two-fifths of the book features the two highlights of the “Age of Enlightenment”, the advancement of science and the attack of the Philosophes upon Christianity. It is this last topic in which Will Durant had waited decades to get to as reason and faith battled leading to the intellectual development of atheism in the cultural context of Catholicism in 18th-Century France especially in play between factions of the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Durant not only introduces the reader to Diderot, Helvetius, D’Holbach, and Voltaire’s shifting view of religion and philosophy in the context of morality. Through the writing a long-time reader can tell how much Will Durant enjoys discussing the topic, but also how he foreshadows the result of this conflict that would not affect England or Germany the same way and why.

The Age of Voltaire finds Will and Ariel Durant detailing the “Age of Enlightenment” following the life of its most well-known thinker, and setting the stage for revolution.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors look at the bricks that go into making up the building of civilization (and more so than with the other volumes in the series they mean the 'cultured man' (almost always a man in this telling)). But, sometimes to understand the whole building it's best not to dwell too much on each of the bricks separately as the authors do within this volume.

There is a lack of context for most of the stories told about the people featured in this volume. Very little on the moving pieces that make up Western Europe as a whole. But, with the Durant's one always gets a beautiful turn of phase and deep thoughts thrown in from time to time, "a mob never has reason, but only has feelings". Voltaire, is always interesting: 'the Catholics believe they are eating the body, the Protestants think they are eating both bread and the body, and the Calvinist think they are eating only bread", "is it one person, one nature, and one will, or two persons, one nature, and one will......".

But as with every book in the series there is a weird anachronistic racism or misogynism that lurks around. They should have known better by 1965: 'who can trust a woman on the opinion of another woman". I guess, they think that was a funny line, but why did you put that woman's opinion in the story if you were going to negate her opinion by negating the opinion of all women regarding other women. There's other misogynism in the story, but it wouldn't be the Durants if they didn't have those kind of anachronisms floating within their story.

I don't really need one hour on what they claim was the first English 'novel' "Pamela", and its follow up "Clarissa" each with their multiple volumes by Richardson (as I was thinking during the long summaries about each novel, "Pamela tells nothing, and Clarissa tells it all"), but I really did not need to know what they contained in such excruciating detail. A lot of this Volume shares too much. I didn't think that about the other three volumes I've read in this series.

Sometimes, it's better to ignore the bricks and talk about the building. Also, there is more to Western Europe than just England and France (and just a little bit of Germany, but that's mostly because Voltaire was there. Good gosh, there was a German enlightenment and part of it was taking place during that time). The world is a moving web with interactions beyond just two nodes especially since those nodes exist in the real world. Regretfully, audible doesn't have Paul Hazards "Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715". It's a better book, and I would recommend that instead.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durant has combined impressive research with good writing and insightful perspective to document an era that is not fully appreciated by the great grandchildren of the age of Voltaire. Truly we owe the pioneers of that generation a debt of eternal gratitude. Those pioneers lived in an age when men were burned at the stake or broken on the wheel for deviating from orthodoxy, and yet they succeeded in laying the foundations of science and philosophy, of reason and conscience, of tolerance and justice, which was largely absent in the thousand years preceding. Durant summed it up in the final pages:

“To the 18th century thinkers, and perhaps the profounder philosophers of the 17th century, we owe the relative freedom that we enjoy in our thought, our speech, and our creeds. We owe the multiplication of libraries, schools, and universities. We owe a hundred human reforms in law and government, in the treatment of crime, sickness, and insanity. To them and the followers of Rousseau, we owe the immense stimulation of mind that produced the literature, science, philosophy, and statesmanship of the 19th century. Because of them, our religions can free themselves more and more from a dulling superstition and a sadistic theology, can turn their backs on obscurantism and persecution, and can recognize the need for mutual sympathy in the diverse tentatives of our ignorance and our hope. Because of those men, we—here and now—can write without fear, though not without reproach. When we cease to honor Voltaire, we shall be unworthy of freedom.”

But there was one other fine thought expressed by Diderot, true to me today, that expresses the infinite human condition at the apex of honest humility and tender nobility:

“I do not condemn the pleasure of the senses. I, too, have a palate that relishes delicate dishes and delicious wines. I have a heart and eyes, and I like to see a beautiful woman. I like to feel under my hand the firmness and roundness of her gorge, to press her lips to mine, to draw pleasure from her eyes, and to expire in her arms. Sometimes with my friends a little debauch, even a bit tumultuous, does not displease me. But, I will not conceal it from you, it seems to me infinitely sweeter to have helped the unfortunate, to have given salutary counsel, to have read an agreeable book, to take a walk with a man or woman dear to me, to have given some instructive hours to my children, to have written a good page, to fulfill the duties of my place, to say to my beloved tender and sweet words that bring her arms around my neck.”

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having just finished volume 9 of the Durants' Story of Civilization I again conclude, as in preceding tomes, that this must be the best one. The decision of telling the story of the Age of Reason by following Voltaire on his travels, correspondence and quarrels works very well, for it allows coverage of the great personages of the time: Louis XIV, the Hanoverian kings of Britain, Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa. This volume is more a story of ideas than of political or military events, and being less wide-ranging geographically than its predecessors, it is more focused and satisfying. I came away from the book with greater respect for figures like Haendel and Diderot. I must confess I never was too much in love with Les Philosophes. I never did particularly appreciate their continual feuds, their debauched morals, their total contempt for traditions and character, their frequent obscenities. Mostly I resented their myopic trust in human reason, when such reason gave us the Jacobin Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, not to mention Bolshevism and Nazism, responsible for killing and maiming in less than two centuries many more millions that ever suffered under the Inquisition and ecclesiastical censure. In this book I found that some philosophes like Holbach lived exemplary lives. That even old rogues like Diderot where in fact brilliant polymaths and superb writers. That Voltaire built a church in Ferney, that he requested a relic from Rome and received a hairshirt that had been Saint Francis of Assisi's, that he went to weekly mass and sometimes received communion and that he was a lay Franciscan. This increased complexity helped me see much that was good in these men's work that I hadn't seen before. I particularly liked that the authors, without condoning religious persecution and censorship, also show the great value that religious faith usually has for most of its believers. A fine performance indeed.

[Jerry M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is volume 9 of the 11 volume 'A Story of Civilization'. It covers the history of Europe from the death of Louis XIV to the death of Voltaire. Given the range, it is really the history France and England with a little bit of Prussia and the rest thrown in. This a history painted by the personalities of the era. The Durants do a good job with most people but some shine. Madame Pompadour comes out very favorably, as long as you understand how she got her power. Émilie du Châtelet, was someone I was not familiar with, a great scientist for her era. Frederick the Great of Prussia comes off as a sad figure, abused as a child, a truly intelligent leader, the times make the man and the times made him a military genius. Voltaire is a volatile personality, not my favorite person, scheming for every last dollar. At least he was entertaining.

The best sections of the book are those on musicians. The Durants must have loved music and their do a wonderful job bringing the elder Back and Handel to life.

If this book has a weakness, it is that accounts of Voltaire divided into multiple sections so that one doesn't get a clear idea of the man until late in the book.

[David Glad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Durant is incredible as always. This one was the best book yet.

It really talks economic issues of the time, such as Britain's South Sea Bubble (it even snared Sir Isaac Newton, who lost many thousands of pounds sterling; investment texts of past decades would cite him as proof you do not necessarily need to be a genius to be a superior investor, even if investing had not evolved from speculation back then) along with John Law's infamous Mississippi Company. (Apparently skilled enough as an economist that Russia wanted him to be their finance minister after he fled the mobs of France.)

These definitely were exciting and enlightened times and I did find it a nice touch a hypothetical conversation between Pope Benedict and Voltaire postmortem where they wanted various subjects at the very end of the book.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A re-read, though I only skimmed it this time. It’s a sturdily written, enlightening (no pun intended) book. Durant’s summaries (see his overview of Hume, for example) and biographical snapshots are terrific. The flavor and sweep of the Enlightenment era is captured wonderfully.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am surely, but slowwwwly, working my way through the Durant's truly magisterial "Civilization" series and the effort of the 17th Century matches its predecessors in both its scope and breadth. You all know the honours this brilliant series earned. Trust me, each was well deserved.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756 ... Emphasis on the Conflict Between Religion and Philosophy. 898 pages. Donated to the library 2010 March.

[Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Durant's best-chock-full-of-nuts!

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt like a more representative work of Durant's, as it dealt with one of his central concerns: the interplay of religion (feeling) and philosophy (reason).

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Can there be anything more splendid than to put the whole world into commotion by a few arguments?”

In what was originally meant to be the penultimate volume in the series, Durant seems to be struggling with a glut of sources, and for the first time an era, the Enlightenment, will get two volumes. Continuing an already existing trend, the Age of Voltaire also mostly focused on Great Britain and France, but this fits in rather neatly with the motif of following Voltaire's life as a framing device for the whole book, since Voltaire spend some years in Britain early in his life, and so the book really starts off there.

The main and most interesting theme was the struggle between religion and secularism. “There is no religion in England” writes Montesquieu in 1731. Lord Hervey, in 1728, observes that “this fable of Christianity... was now so exploded in England that any man of fashion...would have been almost as much ashamed to own himself a Christian as formerly he would have been to profess himself none.” When Queen Caroline is dying, Prime Minister Robert Walpole sends for the Archbishop of Canterbury, “let this farce be played,” Walpole sneers, “...it will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who call us atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they are”

And yet the aristocracy, with their eternal tendency to forget about anyone but themselves, is probably not the most unbiased source as to the general state of religion in the country. Durant notes the countless rebuttals that each work of irreligion invited, and notes that this was also the time of John Wesley, his powerful preaching, and his establishment of Methodism. Religious belief kept fragmenting into different sects, and Voltaire is enchanted by the resulting toleration, praising a London Stock Exchange where a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian are free to do business together.

British Catholicism was dormant in this era, and yet there is a picturesque episode, in which “Bonnie Prince Charlie” the Catholic, Stuart pretender lands in Scotland in 1745 and with the help of his followers, the Jacobites, attempts to reclaim the throne taken from his family by the Glorious Revolution. The attempt is extraordinarily bold, and gains some Scottish sympathy, but England fights back and the attempt fails. Voltaire, reflects on the heroism of the expedition that “could not be expected to succeed in an age when military discipline, artillery, and, above all money, in the end determine everything”

The decay of European religion may have begun in Great Britain, but nowhere did it reach such an intensity as in France. The freethinkers of the time are all denoted philosophes, meaning not philosopher, but a very specific type of progressive, irreligious philosopher. Durant begins coverage of the campaign with a priest Abbe Jean Meslier, hardly the only atheist priest of the time, whom upon his death in 1733, leaves behind a testament, confessing to have lost his faith in the seminary, attacking the Bible, attacking the person of Christ, cursing a God who would condemn any person to eternal hellfire, disavowing all belief in God, and then arguing for communism. Durant summarizes Meslier's idea of a better society: “let the nation appropriate all property; let every man be put to moderate work; let the product be equally shared. Let men and women mate as they wish and part when they please; let their children be brought up together in communal schools. There would then be an end to domestic strife, to class war, and poverty.”

These ideas apparently shocked even Voltaire, but were enthusiastically promoted by Baron D'Holbach, the German born financier, who had hosted one of the most prominent salons of the Enlightenment, inviting the leading men of the time, and calling itself the Synagogue. D'Holbach republished Meslier, and yet also made his own hefty contribution to the anti-religious campaign. The System of Nature, as his great work was called, was not so much directly atheistic, as it was materialist, from which then followed atheism. There is nothing in existence but matter, there is no God, soul, or free will, and he completely accepts the fatalism which that implies. To those who would reply that such a fatalistic worldview invites despair, he remarks that heredity and environment have already determined whether they will despair or persevere, and yet he calls for a program of social reform taking into account this new materialistic paradigm, treating crime as a doctor treats disease. The materialistic theme was also promoted by the physician, La Mettrie, who traced man's origin in a crude theory of evolution, and embraced a hedonistic ethic in which pleasure is the highest good, and there is no hierarchy between intellectual or sensual pleasures. “Let no man repent his indulgence in sensual delights if these involved no harm to others.”

Voltaire,the most famous freethinker of the era, had a complex and seemingly evolving position about religion, hostile to the Catholic Church, to Christianity; crush the infamy, was his slogan against Christianity. However, Voltaire never let go of a belief in God, despite struggles over the problem of suffering, most notably in response to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. 'If God did not exist, he would have to be invented' goes one of his other slogans 'but all nature cries out to us that he does exist' is the rest of the line. He even attempted a refutation of D'Holbach, and at times he even seems out of touch with the times, getting called a bigot by the Paris atheists. He never sought to destroy religion but to turn it into something more tolerant.

The most ambitious work of the era was the Encyclopedia originally a Paris publisher's attempted translation of a British work. One of his collaborators Diderot kept adding to it until it became its own project. The series attacked religious and political orthodoxy, but helping it along was the fact that the government censor Malesherbes, was a skeptic himself. A serious government crackdown on the effort nonetheless came in response to an assassination attempt on the king in 1757 and the Encyclopedia was even banned in Paris in 1759 as a danger to public morals. Diderot continued it, and the apparently lukewarm authorities didn't seem to care, and eventually allowed it to be published in Paris anyways. The whole endeavor showed how much authority religion had lost. The government, seemingly filled with unbelievers anyways, didn't really have its heart in the effort to suppress the Encyclopedia or the wider anti-religious campaign.

Diderot apparently contributed with multiple atheist authors to books besides the Encyclopedia, but he wrote his own as well, and his independent works were rather unique. The strangest was the Dream of D'Alembert, starring a real person, for D'Alembert was one of Diderot's colleagues on the Encyclopedia. The eponymous character mutters philosophical dialogues in his sleep, and two of Diderot's other friends comment on them, occasionally with the interruption of the half asleep D'Alembert. Another book, The Nun was an anticlerical work which came about as a hoax. Diderot wrote to the Marquis de Croixmare, pretending to be a miserable nun, and out of the correspondence emerged an epistolary novel. His most famous work was The Nephew of Rameau, featuring another real person portrayed as a libertine arguing with Diderot himself on the nature of morality. None of these three were ever published in his lifetime and its also noted that Diderot's famous slogan about strangling kings with the entrails of priests is not quite exactly found in any of his works, typical of many famous quotes.

Durant notes that religion fought back. “Some nine hundred works in defense of Christianity were published in France between 1715 and 1789,” a rather good barometer on the rapidly diminishing faith of the population. Seemingly every major work of irreligion had its multiple refutations, and Voltaire admitted that Abbe Guenee's defense of the Bible “bites to the blood.” There was a Catholic Encylopedia, “vaster even than Diderot's and attacking every weak point in that citadel of doubt.” Abbe Nicolas Bergier, already a prominent clergyman writes so able an attack on materialism, that the Church pays him to write apologetics full time. “The finest figure among the clerical defenders of Catholicism in eighteenth century France was Guillaume Francois Berthier” the editor of a Jesuit journal, “a man universally admired by scholars for his vast knowledge, and by all Europe for his modest virtues,” but of course the Jesuits were expelled from France in another triumph for the atheists.

There were non-clerical Catholic apologists as well, most notably Elie Freron, the conservative journalist, historian, and poet who managed to produce thirty volumes. Jacob Moreau and Charles Palissot wrote satire, making fun trends such as “the return to nature” or “the altruism of egoism.” “Against the brilliant Galiani, the learned Bergier, the courteous Berthier, the industrious Freron...the tantalizing Palissot, and the cackling Moreau, the philosophes used every weapon of intellectual war”

The philosophes also applied themselves to the problem of politics, most famous of all being the case of Rousseau, but he awaits the next volume. Every progressive has his utopia, or else what is he progressing to? Often they're imaginary hypotheticals, like Abbe Saint Pierre's 1729 proposal for a European Union, including Turkey, mutually guaranteeing each others territorial integrity, and forever renouncing war. It would have an assembly and an army. Many thinkers of the time considered themselves “good Europeans” before their own nationality, but the time was not ready for such a project. What is curious however, is how many political philosophers of the time found their utopia across the world in China.

“Chinese influence was keenest in France, where the espirits fots seized upon it as another weapon against Christianity. In China they found a paradise, enlightened in religion and in government, which France did not live up to, and the moderate Montesquieu “stood his ground against the Oriental tide, called the Chinese emperors despots, denounced dishonest Chinese merchants, exposed the poverty of the Chinese masses...” which of course invited refutation from zealous philosophes. “Turgot, skeptical of the Chinese utopia” actually commissioned an investigation in China to critically examine all the hype.

This was a time of growing global consciousness with Chinese, Arab, Persian, and Sanskrit works being translated into French. The first French anti-colonial book was produced by Guillame Raynal, perhaps in collaboration with Diderot, in which he “denounced the greed, treachery, and violence of the Europeans in dealing with the natives of the East and West Indies and warned the white man of the terrible revenge that the colored races might take if ever they came to power” Yet the book, was not only anti-colonial, but wide enough in scope to serve as a blueprint for the Revolution. He condemned religion and argued for democracy and freedom of thought.

The book ends with a fictional discussion between Voltaire and Pope Benedict XIV, whom Voltaire had once dedicated his book Mahomet to. Durant's own views shine through, and its clear that he's a moderate, as skeptical of utopia and endless progress as he is of any supernatural heaven, but the dialogue is amicable.

What a shame that I cannot cover the politics of Robert Walpole and William Pitt, of Frederick II and Louis XV, the writings of Alexander Pope, of Samuel Richardson, Marivaux, the music of Bach and Handel, the discoveries of Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Linneus, and Buffon, but Durant did, extensively, and on much more. This was the era of rising industrialization, the war of the Austrian Succession, and the colonial rivalry of France and Britain, and yet there's more revolution here in thought than in politics. The philosophes, often a part of the aristocracy themselves, generally would not wish to violently overthrow the enlightened monarchs who often sympathized with and helped them. It remains for that eccentric romantic Rousseau, actually born into poverty, to dominate the second half of the 18th century, star in the next volume of the series and pave the way for Revolution.