Abstract

In Voltaire In Exile, Ian Davidson has recreated this period in the life of one of the giant figures of the Enlightenment. By painstakingly translating the rich correspondence between Voltaire and his family, members of the Court at Versailles and the French intellectual elite, Davidson allows us to discover Voltaire the artist, the campaigner, the aesthete, the lover and the humorist. The result is a vivid portrait of this extraordinarily funny, iconoclastic, complex and ferociously intelligent individual, described by Diderot as 'the unique man of the century.'