With its tales of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs, and tireless battles against his critics, priests and king, Roger Pearson's Voltaire Almighty brings the father of Enlightenment to vivid life. Voltaire Almighty provides a lively look at the life and thought of one of the major forces behind European Enlightenment. A rebel from start to finish (1694-1778), Voltaire was an ailing and unwanted bastard child who refused to die; and when he did consent to expire some eighty-four years later, he secured a Christian burial despite a bishop's ban. During much of his life Voltaire was the toast of society for his plays and verse, but his barbed wit and commitment to human reason got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the king, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. His personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, Voltaire never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: Emilie, who died after giving birth to the child of another lover, and his niece, Marie-Louise, with whom he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. The consummate outsider; a dissenter who craved acceptance while flamboyantly disdaining it; author of countless stories, poems, books, plays, treatises, and tracts as well as some twenty thousand letters to his friends: Voltaire lived a long, active life that makes for engaging and entertaining reading. Roger Pearson is professor of French at Oxford and a fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford. He has translated such French classics as Voltaire's Candide and Emile Zola's La Bete Humaine and Germinal. In 2004 he was appointed Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the French government. He lives in Oxforshire, England, with his wife and two children. In this biography of Voltaire, Roger Pearson provides a look at the life and thought of one of the major forces behind the European Enlightenment. Voltaire's plays and verse made him the toast of society, but the author of Candide and The Philosophical Dictionary was a tireless self-promoter and controversial figure who frequently inspired as much ire as adulation. By the age of forty, he had been jailed twice and exiled once. An advocate of human rights, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution; when in flight from Frederick the Great, his one-time friend and philosophical ally, he wanted to return to his native France but was rebuffed by the king, who exiled him yet again. Voltaire's personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, he never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: The first was Emilie Chatelet, his intellectual equal. A renowned scientist married to a French bureaucrat, she died while giving birth to yet another man's child. The second, Mary Louise Denis, his niece, twenty years his junior, remained with her esteemed uncle for the last two decades of his life. The consummate outsider, a dissenter who craved acceptance while flamboyantly disdaining it, author of countless stories, poems, books, plays, treatises, and tracts as well as some twenty thousand letters to his friends: Voltaire had a long and active life, all for the cause of freedom--his own and others. Like Davidson in Voltaire in Exile, Pearson focuses his biography on one of Voltaire's philosophical passions. Whereas Davidson highlighted the crusade for justice and human rights that consumed the French writer's later years, Pearson emphasizes the love of liberty that informed Voltaire's entire life. Readers thus come to understand that it was his never-ending quest for freedom that put Voltaire in continual conflict with censors and priests, monarchs and critics. In his personal life, Voltaire's defiance of restraints meant a series of nonmarital liaisons, including amours with a prominent actress and his own iconoclastic niece. In his literary work, Voltaire dared to ridicule pontiffs and kings, even though such brazenness repeatedly put his work on the church's list of forbidden books. Surprisingly, Voltaire's refusal to accept any form of orthodoxy put him at odds not only with prelates but also with doctrinaire atheists. As a thinker who rarely followed any rules not of his own making, Voltaire incurred the wrath of authorities in France, England, and Prussia, yet Pearson shows how time and again the canny dramatist steered his way out of seeming disaster and into a promising new adventure. As a scholar at home in the French Enlightenment, Pearson translates into a saucy English the restless energy that made Voltaire one of the most brilliant figures in European literature. A spirited biography that truly captures Voltaire's irrepressible genius.--Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review) This new biography's title seems to deify one of the leaders of the French Enlightenment, whose writings espoused reason and the dignity of man. But while Pearson, a professor of French at Oxford, speaks loftily of Voltaire (1694-1778) as a hero, his book offers a grounded portrait of his long and often troubled life. Born Francois-Marie Arouet, he was imprisoned early on for his heretical writings and was exiled from Paris for 25 years. His work wasn't truly respected until he was past 80 and near death; it was then that statues of him were erected and he became godlike. Voltaire's plays caused a furor because they satirized the Catholic Church and the royal family, against whose repressive rule Voltaire revolted in his writings and through his financial support of victims of the repression. His business fortune also went to the two women in his life, the Marquise du Chatelet, a mathematician and his longtime mistress, and his niece (and also his mistress), Marie-Louise Denis. Yet the author of Candide and major works of philosophy seems to have had less interest in the physicality of love than in the emotion, and this book illuminates the man as he struggled to support freedom in a repressive world.--Publishers Weekly

"This new biography's title seems to deify one of the leaders of the French Enlightenment, whose writings espoused reason and the dignity of man. But while Pearson, a professor of French at Oxford, speaks loftily of Voltaire (1694 — 1778) as a hero, his book offers a grounded portrait of his long and often troubled life. Born Franois-Marie Arouet, he was imprisoned early on for his heretical writings and was exiled from Paris for 25 years. His work wasn't truly respected until he was past 80 and near death; it was then that statues of him were erected and he became godlike. Voltaire's plays caused a furor because they satirized the Catholic Church and the royal family, against whose repressive rule Voltaire revolted in his writings and through his financial support of victims of the repression. His business fortune also went to the two women in his life, the Marquise du Chtelet, a mathematician and his longtime mistress, and his niece (and also his mistress), Marie-Louise Denis. Yet the author of Candide and major works of philosophy seems to have had less interest in the physicality of love than in the emotion, and this book illuminates the man as he struggled to support freedom in a repressive world." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In this lively biography, Pearson (French, U. of Oxford) matches in tone and spirit the raucous life of his subject. Pearson details Voltaire's humble beginnings, his relentless self-promotion, his advocacy for human rights, and the vacillation of his popularity at court. The color plates of paintings of Voltaire and his contemporaries contribute to Pearson's success in placing Voltaire in the context of 18th-century Europe. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)