Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings,
by David Bodanis
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Book Summary Information
Author: David BodanisEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-10
ISBN: 0307237206
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Crown
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307237200
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
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Book Reviews of Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings,
Book Review: A decent Hollywood screenplay... lousy history
Summary: 2 Stars
A few years ago, Alan Palmer published a biography of Marie-Louise, Napoleon's second wife and Empress of France, arguing quite correctly that famous women of the 18-19th century are often ignored by biographers and seen only through the lens of the famous men in their lives. He then proceeded to write a book that was 90% about Napoleon, Metternich, and other famous men. David Bodanis hasn't been quite as egregious, but his book is essentially the same: Despite all the claims of placing the woman at the center of the narrative, it is in fact Voltaire, the famous man, who is still the focus. Whenever the narrative covers their time apart, Voltaire almost always gets more space.
If that were the end of this book's problems, then it would be forgivable, for there is still much that Bodanis reveals about Emilie de Chatelet that makes for interesting reading. But in fact Bodanis is so woefully inadequate as a historian, and so out of his depth as a narrator of this period, that "Passionate Minds" becomes an almost non-stop howler.
Bodanis has virtually no conception of the politics and wars of this conflict-ridden period; neither who was fighting whom, nor where nor how. So in a narrative whose characters are frequently in the midst of war, Bodanis makes innumerable embarrassing errors. He "compensates" (if that is the word) by trying to be very, very cute. So he reduces the French cavalry charge at Fontenoy to "pampered nobles" gallivanting for fun. He seems not to know what a regiment was, misunderstands the famous "Potsdam grenadiers" of Prussia's Frederick William I, and creates an "Austro-Hungarian Empire" more than a century and a half before such a state existed.
Bodanis tends to invent liberally to cover the gaps in his understanding. He tells us that Voltaire left Prussia because Frederick the Great made homosexual advances upon him. (Not true.) He does not seem to know why the War of the Austrian Succession happened, nor all of the nations involved, and so he writes that fighting in the Low Countries in the 1740s was simply a French need for "revenge."
His understanding of 18th-century economics is only marginally better. When describing Emilie's scheme to sell tax-farming futures, Bodanis doesn't appear to understand that the French government (along with many others) was already in the business of speculating on future revenues, as part of its increasingly wild schemes to raise revenues on borrowed time as the aforementioned War of the Austrian Succession wore on and threatened to bankrupt the state. Rather, Bodanis has this happening at the instigation of his protagonists, because Emilie was clever, and the tax-collectors were "dim." (218).
In his attempts to explain class-privilege, Bodanis almost always indulges in contempt and sarcasm, ignoring even the evidence in his own narrative that demonstrates how 18th century aristocrats viewed service to the state and of course, patriotism. His is a bourgeois teleology in which all thinkers who proposed systems we nowadays consider normal, must have been martyred, forward-thinking heroes, morally superior to those "dim" "pampered nobility."
I am not a scientist, so I don't know if Bodanis has mangled the descriptions of science as badly as he mangles politics, war, society, and economics. To a layman like myself, his descriptions of the scientific experiments - while redundant - were adequate. For this contribution alone, I give the book a second star, since one does not often think of Voltaire as a person who dabbled in science, with or without the help of his brilliant mistress.
In fact, Bodanis' favorite themes are to extol the British and the middle class, at the expense of the French and the aristocracy - a sort of amateur history in which the good guys are pre-destined to win. His ignorance, however, prevents him from giving a balanced treatment even if he wanted to. For instance, Bodanis spends two pages trashing Louis XV (whom he describes as a "dolt"), for showing up to command the French army and doing a mediocre job of it... without any mention that Britain's King George II had done exactly the same thing - with equally poor results - two years earlier in the very same war.
But that sort of balanced analysis wouldn't be as much fun to write. Bodanis prefers instead to Hollywoodize his protagonists and their era, talking down to his readers as if they couldn't understand concepts unless they were reduced to banal oversimplifications and then dressed-up in cheap-shot humor, embellished with fiction to glue the mess all together.
Who knows. Maybe Voltaire would have loved it. But Voltaire would have at least done his homework.
More Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, reviews:
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