Voltaire's Revolution

June 15, 2015
Voltaire (1694â1778) remains best known for Candide, his biting satire on naive optimism, but he also waged a ferocious and sustained writing campaign against religious intolerance. Despite Noyer's lifeless translation, this collection of 20 entries from Voltaire's pamphlet wars amply reveals the author's wit and intellectual agility. In the hilarious "Wives, Submit to Your Husbands," a French aristocrat's wife tells her priest that if she had been married to St. Paul, author of the titular injunction, she would have shown him a thing or two. "Catechism of the Honest Man" takes the form of a dialogue between a Greek Orthodox monk and a confirmand (the honest man), in which the latter affirms the simplicity of faithâ"I adore God, I try to be just, and I seek to instruct myself"âin the face of overly complex dogma. Voltaire's most acerbic commentary appears in "The Emperor of China and Friar Chuckles" in which the emperor calls the Pope a "little Italian lama" and the Christian missionaries to China the Pope's "blind instruments." Noyer's introduction is devoted to a tedious, unnecessary defense of Voltaire's reputation, apparently based on the unproven assumption that the writer is currently neglected by American readers and scholars, when an overview of Voltaire's body of work and dicussion of his contemporary relevance would have been more useful. However, the appendix, which contains contemporary accounts of Voltaire, does provides helpful context for the writings. Agent: Erzsi Deak, Hen&Ink Literary Agency (France).