Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  For the period after this book—when much of Voltaire's greatest work was still to come—Ian Davidson's Voltaire in Exile (London, 2004) is an excellent start. The Oxford academic Roger Pearson has been a wise commentator on Voltaire's writings, as in his thoughtful The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's “Contes Philosophiques” (Oxford, 1993), and although his biography Voltaire Almighty (London, 2005) appeared too late to be drawn on for the present book, it's a good, comprehensive account.

  There's a mountain of publications about various aspects of Voltaire's life; standout volumes from that heap include The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences by Margaret Sherwood Libby (New York, 1966); almost anything by Peter Gay, such as his Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (New Haven and London, 1988) or his The Party of Humanity: Studies in the French Enlightenment (London, 1964); also the old volume Voltaire's Visit to England by Archibald Ballantyne (London, 1898), which goes well beyond its declared title, to include captivating firsthand reports by many foreign visitors to the elderly Voltaire. Jacques Van den Heuvel's Voltaire dans ses contes: de Micromégas à l'Ingénu (Paris, 1967) starts with what seem to be summaries of stories, then opens them up to reveal a gripping cognitive anthropology of Voltaire's thought. Madeleine Raaphorst's article “Voltaire et féminisme: Un examen du théâtre et des contes,” in Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (hereafter SVEC), vol. 39, gives a further angle on that topic, of special relevance to our book.

  Emilie

  The reader who has some French is in for a treat, for that saint of a scholar, Theodore Besterman, along with finding out everything about Voltaire, also spent years collecting Les Lettres de la Marquise du Châtelet (2 vols., Geneva, 1958). Browsing them is the best way I know into her life.

  Du Châtelet's own little volume On Happiness is fearsomely honest: written when she was feeling isolated from Voltaire, was making little progress on her Newton opus—and had not yet met Saint-Lambert. The edition by Robert Mauzi (Discours sur le bonheur, Paris, 1961) has a long editor's introduction, concentrating on the emotional and physical texture of her thought, but the less elaborated Badinter edition (Paris, 1997) is more easily accessible. (Several paragraphs of extracts can be found in English, in the volume by Esther Ehrman mentioned on p. 347.)

  The introduction to Emilie's Institutions de physique is especially touching, with its remarks to her then not-quite-teenage son—“You are, my dear son, at the happy age when your mind begins to think, yet your heart isn't powerful enough to overthrow it.” She recommends he start serious studying now, for she goes on to note that soon he'll be distracted by women, then by the quest for glory, and if he waits till all that's over to begin work in earnest, he'll find—as she knows only too well from her own experience—that he'll be frustrated at how much less supple his mind has become than when he was young.

  The main biographer in French is René Vaillot, in his Madame du Châtelet (Paris, 1978), and then in his contribution to Pomeau's multivolume Voltaire biography (p. 344). Yet although his books are impeccable in accuracy, and earnest in tone, they somehow remain on the outside of Emilie's life, looking in (though the 1978 work was written at a better point in Vaillot's life, and has a vigor the latter one lacks). In Elisabeth Badinter, however (Emilie, Emilie: l'ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle; Paris, 1983), Emilie has found her ideal biographer. Badinter knows, from firsthand experience, what it's like to be born to great wealth and live with a brilliant man, yet still feel that life isn't always quite as satisfying as she had hoped.

  The dear cousin Renée-Caroline took hundreds of pages in her Souvenirs de la marquise de Créquy (7 vols., Paris, 1834), to recount the slights and the ingratitude she experienced in her long, prosperous life—which might not have been relaxing for the wealthy man she married, but is a boon for the his torian: the time she spent in Emilie's childhood home fits neatly into our story. Many of the anecdotes about Louis XVI and Napoleon in her memoirs are apocryphal and were inserted well after her death; the early sections, however, seem more closely based on her actual notes. The estimable servant Longchamp spent years preparing the materials for his own memoirs (see under Voltaire, p. 344), and if he slightly overplays the occasions when he gets to see his mistress unclothed, or in a bath, it is always in the most dignified fashion.

  Among English-language biographies, the most powerful has to be Nancy Mitford's Voltaire in Love (London, 1957): often bitchy, generally clueless—and a great romp to read. The deeper flaw is that although Mitford admits that science is not her strength, she does hint to readers that she has an inside track to the attitudes of European aristocracy. But she's writing in the 1950s—when successful social democratic movements were undermining belief in that world—and so a prickly, defensive tone creeps in. The wiser biographer Frank Hamel, in his An Eighteenth-Century Marquise: A Study of Emilie du Châtelet and Her Times (London, 1910), captures the rhythms of a genuinely aristocratic world much better—aided by his completing his book just before the First World War.

  Esther Ehrman's Mme du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment (Leamington Spa, 1986) is very brief, but good on the passion for gambling, and also has useful extracts in English of Emilie's writings—as well as Voltaire's proud memoir of Emilie's life, from his introduction to her posthumously published Newton translation Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle (Paris, 1759). The volume by the writer Jonathan Edwards (pseudonym of Noel Gerson), The Divine Mistress (London, 1971), is less than trustworthy, not least in the author's habit of transposing events (as with his having Emilie enter a café in disguise, while in fact it was Voltaire who did that). Used with caution, though, it does highlight a number of areas that more thorough research can pin down.

  An excellent biography promises to be the one currently being prepared by Judith Zinsser, a leading scholar of Emilie's life. Of her many articles, the brief “Entrepreneur of the ‘Republic of Letters': Emilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, and Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees,” French Historical Studies

  25, 4 (2002) pp. 595–624, is especially insightful on Emilie's first creative efforts at Cirey, while her “Emilie du Chatelet: Genius, Gender and Intellectual Authority,” in Hilda Smith's edited Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 168–90, is an excellent wider survey. The overview she and Julie Candler Hayes edited, Emilie du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science (SVEC, January 2006), assembles experts from art history, philosophy, and the history of publishing to probe even further in those and other disciplines.

  For the attitudes Emilie had to face from the male scientific community throughout her life, I especially like Mary Terrall's “Emilie du Châtelet and the Gendering of Science,” History of Science 33 (1995), pp. 283–310. The volume edited by Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge, A History of Women in the West, vol. 3: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), widens the perspective even more.

  There's useful information in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Samia I. Spencer (Bloomington, 1984), as well as—though more dryly— in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime by Erica Harth (Ithaca and London, 1992). But my favorite book on women in this period is Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994) by Dena Goodman, who observes, for example, that in the same way that as many male thinkers were taking strength from the “primitives” who were being discovered abroad, others were “colonizing” the new domain of women in the metropolis, using observations on women such as Emilie for their own political ends. Londa Schiebinger's The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) goes further on the mix of supportive and negative attitudes through which Emilie had to navigate.

  Of the many books on specialized topics, don't miss Thomas Kavanagh's Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture (Philadelphia, 2
005), with its subtle insights into the views different groups brought to bear on this most compelling of time-wasting activities.

  Cirey

  The key source for daily life at Cirey is the account left by the most unembarrassable houseguest in history: Madame de Graffigny. Her gushing—and surprisingly touching—letters sprawl over more than a hundred pages in the fifth and sixth volumes of the correspondence within the Voltaire Foundation's Complete Works of Voltaire; they are also available (with some extraneous material) in de Graffigny's own Vie Priveé de Voltaire et de Mme du Châtelet (Paris, 1820). She has only the vaguest connection with numerical reality, so her account of the number of fireplaces in the château or the proximity of mountains can't be trusted, but anything involving emotions or envy is strikingly accurate—her impassioned descriptions of her hostess's furnishings are a close match to what was recorded in the inventory of Emilie's belongings a decade later. I used a few extracts in chapter 9.

  Ira O. Wade is the modern author who first reemphasized Emilie's scientific work, and his early volume Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey (Princeton, 1941) is a basic source—although the author's difficulties with regard to non-obfuscatory exposition had already reached their full flowering. A balanced overview of the early years is in the 2001 special issue of SVEC, titled Cirey dans la vie intellectuelle: la réception de Newton en France, while the earlier study “Chemistry at Cirey,” by Robert Walters (SVEC, vol. 58, 1967), elaborates on that central episode of attempted creativity there. William H. Barber, “Mme du Châtelet and Leibnizianism: The Genesis of the Institutions de physique,”in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W. H. Barber et al. (Edinburgh and London, 1967), pp. 200–22, is crisp on that next stage in her work (though see the reevaluation of his work in the 2006 SVEC in the Emilie entry above). The château's present owners have a good Web site, www.visitvoltaire.com, with useful links as well as details on the reconstruction of the attic theater.

  Other Characters

  There are biographies or memoirs available for all of the other characters; especially good ones include Hubert Cole, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber: The Life of Louis-François-Armand, Maréchal Duc de Richelieu (London, 1965); Elisabeth Badinter, Les Passions intellectuelles, vol. 1: Désirs de gloire (1735–1751) (Paris, 1999), which is chattily discursive on Maupertuis and his crowd; Gordon Craig's The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (New York, 1964), superb on Frederick's place in the Prussian military tradition; Frederick's own wildly self-serving but psychologically astute Political Testament and Form of Government (extracts conveniently available in Eugen Weber's The Western Tradition, vol. II [Lexington, Mass., 1995]; and Margaret Crosland's Madame de Pompadour: Sex, Culture and Power (Stroud, 2000), which is more understanding than many earlier accounts—though for good gossip, there's nothing like the Goncourt brothers' Madame de Pompadour, revue et augmentée de lettres et de documents inédits (Paris, 1878).

  Gaston Maugras's La Cour de Lunéville au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1904) is the ideal introduction to Saint-Lambert and the world that let him thrive. Everything Frank McLynn has written on 1745 and Bonnie Prince Charlie, from his France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh, 1981) to his Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 2003; orig. published as Charles Edward Stuart, 1988), comes highly recommended. McLynn's research is comprehensive, his writing crisp, and his psychological observation astute—be it on the way the heart went out of Stuart's forces once they turned back at Derby with an undefended London a scant 127 miles away, or on the flurry of confusion that caused conflicts between Phélypeaux and Richelieu to hold back the French invasion force that otherwise would undoubtedly have led His Britannic Majesty's citizens to become His Bourbonic Majesty's subjects.

  Readers who have access to a good university library will be touched by the Histoire des amours de Cléante et de Bélise (Paris, 1689), the novel a young Anne Bellinzani wrote, based closely on her love affair with Emilie's father, Louis-Nicolas, when he was first becoming aware of how powerfully a young woman could dream of happiness in the stars.

  Louis XV's France

  The ideal place to start is Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, tr. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago, 1998), which has been justly famous for nearly two centuries. Not only does Tocqueville have a more nuanced view than Marx, but he also ingeniously shifts perspective as needed, homing in on Canada at one point, for example, since—with no feudal tradition to block central authority—“all the deformities of the government of Louis XIV are seen there, as if through a microscope.”

  Gwynne Lewis's France 1715–1804: Power and the People (London, 2005), or Colin Jones's The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London, 2002), are both good on the researches that Tocqueville's insights have led to; William Doyle's edited volume Old Regime France (Oxford, 2001) is at times a bit bloodless but does show the state of academic research. Robin Briggs's Early Modern France 1560–1715 (Oxford, 2nd ed., 1998) outlines the world Louis XV had to work with, and is written in the no-nonsense tone that makes visitors to All Souls, Oxford, wonder why there should be more than one Fellow there, as each, clearly, is wise enough to be a world unto himself.

  P. N. Furbank's Diderot: A Critical Biography (London, 1992) is another of the volumes that's much broader than the title suggests, and sketches the wider setting with aplomb. Alistair Horne has a gift for titles, and his Seven Ages of Paris (London, 2002) is a loving homage to the city he's written about from many aspects over many years.

  The stunning incompetence of Phélypeaux and others in Louis XV's administration—which makes certain recent residents of the Oval Office seem paragons of nepotism-free efficiency—is a leitmotif of the highly recommended The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815, by N. A. M. Rodger (London, 2004); see especially his middle chapters. One of the first twentieth-century books to show that tacit groupings of nobles were a subversive force in the years before the French Revolution, fighting back to regain the exemptions they'd been losing, was Franklin Ford's confident Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy After Louis XIV (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). G. Chaussinand-Nogaret's La Noblesse au dixhuitième siècle (Paris, 1976) has more of a filigree construction: it shows how deeply the idea of “honor” could shape an entire class's life, and suggests that defending it against ideas of competence, and of compassion, was at the heart of France's later social explosion. For fun, Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process (tr. Edmund Jephcott; Oxford, 1978; German original, 1939) takes seemingly bizarre curios of what to us are the uncouth table manners of those nobles and their antecedents, using them to reveal the social and political pressures that created our “natural” manners today.

  Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun's The Birth of Intimacy, tr. Jocelyn Phelps (Oxford, 1991), and Jean-Louis Flandrin's Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, tr. Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1976) are calm, fairly analytical approaches to their topics. Uta Ranke-Heinemann's Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, tr. Peter Heinegg (New York, 1990), by contrast, as well as G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter's edited collection Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill, 1988), tell us far more about eighteenth-century ejaculata than any normal person would wish to know. The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury France, ed. Michel Feher (New York and Cambridge, Mass., 1997), gives yet more firsthand accounts.

  The Enlightenment

  Getting direct exposure to the main writers of the Enlightenment is a treat, for most of them were writers of the highest order. Essays by Hume, Diderot, and almost all of the others make an ideal start; Isaac Kramnick's edited The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York, 1995) is a convenient collection of bite-sized extracts. The volume edited by David Williams in the Readings in the History of Political Thought series, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 199
9), samples fewer thinkers, but at greater length.

  Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951; original ed., 1932) is a profound work of intellectual history, successfully rebutting the Romantic criticism of “the shallow Enlightenment”; Carl Becker's classic The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932) takes those critiques in a sharply original direction. Since his book is a fairly close transcription of spoken lectures, it's also written in an easy, whimsical tone, though the corrective Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited, ed. Raymond O. Rockwood (Cornell, 1968), is good to go with it. The collection What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Baker and Peter Reill (Stanford, 2001), is useful on more recent views from the academy, though the smugness of some of the essays would no doubt have made Cirey's residents sigh.

  Robert Darnton will always be known for his classic The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), with its deep reading of seemingly meaningless oddities in pre-Revolutionary France. He's a natural writer whose ideas have been enriched by proximity to Clifford Geertz at Princeton, as also seen in his more comprehensive The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (London, 1996), though the corrective The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Haydn T. Mason (Oxford, 1998; originally vol. 359 of “Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century”) is good to keep at hand, not least for Daniel Gordon's delightfully unfair article “The Great Enlightenment Massacre,” which shows Darnton giving perhaps more importance than deserved to the scribes of Grub Street.