''The Friends of Voltaire'' is an anecdotal biography of 18th-century French
Enlightenment writer
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778), known by his ''Pen name, nom de plume'' Voltaire (, ; ), was a French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment writer, philosopher (''philosophe''), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit ...
written by English author
Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym ''S. G. Tallentyre''. It was published in 1906.
In 1907, it was published in Great Britain under the author's own name by
G. P. Putnam's Sons.
The classic work about Voltaire was still being printed nearly 100 years later in 2003.
Overview
The book is in the form of an anecdotal biography telling the stories of ten men whose lives fell very closely together. The ten men were true contemporaries and aside from their friendship with Voltaire they were more or less closely associated with one another. Each of the ten is characterized by giving him an identifying label:
d'Alembert
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert ( ; ; 16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanics, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the ''E ...
the Thinker,
Diderot
Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during t ...
the Talker,
Galiani the Wit,
Vauvenargues the Aphorist,
d'Holbach the Host,
Grimm the Journalist,
Helvétius the Contradiction,
Turgot the Statesman,
Beaumarchais the Playwright, and
Condorcet
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (; ; 17 September 1743 – 29 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, political economist, politician, and mathematician. His ideas, including suppo ...
the Aristocrat.
The chapter on Helvétius contains a famous quotation that was subsequently misattributed to Voltaire himself. While discussing the persecution of Helvétius for his book "On the Mind" (which was publicly burned), Hall wrote:
The phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", which was originally intended as a summary (by Hall) of Voltaire's attitude, was widely misread as a literal quotation from Voltaire.
References
External links
''The friends of Voltaire by S. G. Tallentyre''— Full text at Open Library.
1906 non-fiction books
Works about Voltaire
Biographies about philosophers
Biographies about writers
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