It is Voltaire’s death anniversary. Voltaire died in his 84th year in Paris in 1778, 33 days before Jean-Jacques Rousseau died in Geneva, a few months after finally making the trip back to the capital from where Voltaire had been banished decades earlier, and a few weeks after Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin met for the first time.
Franklin had admired him from afar going back to 1733, when he started reading him, and 1755, when he printed excerpts of Voltaire’s Siecle de Louis XIV in an American edition, then the Treaty on Tolerance in the late 1760s, where Franklin was again seduced by Voltaire’s appreciation of Quakers.
Franklin went to see Voltaire with Franklin’s grandson in tow, and asked Voltaire to bless the younger man: “God and liberty,” are the words Voltaire spoke for the occasion, apparently in English the first time (he was fluent, thanks to his three years of exile in England in his much younger days, when the despicable conte de Rohan, a vulgar aristocrat, first had him beaten, then imprisoned at the Bastille, then exiled, after Voltaire justly insulted him: Rohan had belittled Voltaire’s bourgeois origins, making fun of Voltaire’s name change–he was born Francois Marie Arouet–so Voltaire, ever the wit, told him that at least he didn’t bear a name he dishonored). Franklin, he called “the illustrious and wise monsieur Franklin, the most respectable man in America and probably Europe.”
All this is fine and good but just trivia compared to this: in 1968 Theodore Besterman, the Voltaire scholar who was first to complete a 50-volume edition of Voltaire’s complete correspondence, started a second, far more complete edition of the correspondence, and started the most accomplished, exhaustive edition of Voltaire’s works. Besterman–quirky, arrogant as hell, sometimes mean (he called for charity toward Rousseau, considering how vicious Voltaire was toward Jean-Jacques, yet named his dog after him) and brilliant–died in 1976, but the great work was launched.
The Voltaire Foundation established itself in Oxford (Voltaire would have loved the irony of England midwifing the complete works of the greatest Frenchman of the ages) and just in March, the 205-volume edition was finally completed. It’s not for the faint of cents: each volume runs around $150 (you can shop here). Princeton and Harvard historian and 18th century scholar Robert Darnton delivered the celebratory lecture. Écrasez l’infâme!
The Insurgent Calendar
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