Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753-78 Book

"In 1753, King Louis XV forced Voltaire - playwright, poet, philosopher, and one of the most celebrated figures in Europe - into exile. Voltaire carved out a vibrant world in isolation, becoming a successful entrepreneur, writing his masterpiece, Candide, and lavishing upon those around him the finer things in life. Moreover, during these twenty-five years in Geneva, Voltaire developed his modern ideas of human rights and social equality, which were borne out in his campaigns against a series of miscarriages of justice." In Voltaire in Exile, Ian Davidson has re-created 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, the humorist. The result is a portrait of this funny, iconoclastic, complex, and ferociously intelligent individual - the man Diderot described as "the unique man of the century."