Customer Reviews

Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and...

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After reading David Bodanis' previous work, E=mc2: A History of the World's Most Famous Equation , I was hooked on this author's way of presenting science and research that was neither boring nor pendantic. Instead, he takes the time to explain how a particular idea or discovery relates to the modern reader, and presents researchers not just as dodgy old coots in laboratories muttering in arcane languages.

Instead, Passionate Minds takes a very different route. It begins with a child, a little girl, who grew up in the Paris of Louis XV, a time when women were expected to be not much more than brood mares and ornamental objects. But Emilie was very different. For one thing, she was clever, with a mind that could grasp not just the social niceties of the day -- that of being able to make conversation and turn a witty phrase -- but also understand mathematics and the beginings of modern science, and a particular love of astronomy. To say taht Emilie was unusual for her time is an understatement. Her father adored her, and did everything he could to encourage her studies. Her mother, on the other hand, wasn't too pleased by the intellectual leanings of her daughter's mind, wishing that she would instead be a bit more interested in fashion and young men. Emilie does marry, to a wealthy aristocrat, and it's after here that the story takes on an interesting twist.

Today, most marriages are regarded as romantic attachments, but in the eighteenth century, you married more as a business arrangement. A couple married for financial security, or for social status, and Emilie was lucky enough to get both in her husband. She became Madame la Marquise du Chatellet, and after presenting her husband with two children, she embarked on a series of affairs. Adultery, while certainly a sin, was acceptable among the aristocracy so long as decency and discretion was maintained -- it was incorrect to visit both your wife and your mistress when they were in the same town, for example. And Emilie was just as unusual with her lovers as she was with her studies -- one would become the model for Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the one who would make the greatest change in her life was the writer known as Voltaire.

Voltaire, best known for his play Candide, was a bit of a troublemaker. His Letters from England were publically burned, and he was no stranger to exile either. And when he and Emilie met, they recognized in each other kindred spirits. Voltaire was charming, had made a fortune in wheat speculation, and even became good friends with Emilie's husband. Together they would refurbish a chateau in the countryside that would become a center for learning and scientific exploration, and able to encourage each other in their work, along with maintaining a physical relationship.

But when Emilie's work managed to receive more acclaim than Voltaire's, the relationship had a rift. And stung, Emilie turned to her one consolation -- Newtonian physics -- and began the work that would gain her the most recognition.

How the rest of the story plays out is what makes this one so interesting. Emilie managed to stay friends with Voltaire, even if the sexual aspects of their relationship had ended. Bodanis manages to hit the high points of each person's life, arranging it more or less in chronological order, and takes the time to digress now and then to explain how a social situation or discovery for a modern reader, and presents everything in a tidy, fairly coherent whole. There's plenty of scandal and humor in here, some of it rather tongue-in-cheek, and plenty to whet the reader's appetite for more.

I found myself wanting to know more about Emilie and Voltaire and Bodanis kindly supplies not just notes with that have suggested reading, but also an extensive bibliography. An insert of black and white photos is supplied as well, which help to give a face to many of the names and places. The narrative itself moves along quite briskly, and keeps explainations and digressions to a minimum, and never gets bogged down in the details.

For anyone who is interested in the birth of the Enlightenment, the role of women in a very male society, or wonders how scientific research got going, I would happily suggest this book. It's geared for the general reader, and makes a grand introduction to history in a very appealling way. Don't miss this one!

There is to be a new biography of Emilie published later on this year, by Judith Zinsser called La Dame d'Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet

It is difficult enough to write engagingly about someone who died over two hundred years ago; David Bodanis has written an excellent history not merely of one interesting person but of two: Emilie du Chatelet and her sometime lover Voltaire. In a narrative spanning (in detail) nearly two decades, in which Voltaire's fortunes rose, sank, rose, sank, and rose again and in which Emilie herself underwent tribulations both common (failed love affairs) and uncommon (struggling to create a place for herself amongst the first rank of European thinkers), Bodanis succeeds admirably in engaging our interest and sympathy.

Most readers are unlikely to be familiar with the oppressive manners peculiar to the Courts of Louis XIV and his even more amazingly doltish son Louis XV; Bodanis gives us what we need to know in order to make sense of the maze through which Voltaire so frequently stumbled and through which the much more quick-witted Emilie navigated with efficiency.

Likewise we are given enough context to follow the twists and turns of these twinned lives, without feeling either that Bodanis is patronising us or providing unnecessary embellishments. It's a tour-de-force of delicate writing that allows the reader to sail along on the current of Bodanis' painstakingly assembled knowledge, all the while growing deeper in our attachment to the two central characters. This is the more remarkable in that Bodanis shelters us only a little from their failings. Voltaire is shown as vainglorious and weak; Emilie can be glimpsed as being rather too intense for most mortals to cope with. Yet together they made sense of the world and of each other, and the reader feels genuine pity and sadness as their relationship gradually changes. The fiery intensity of their first love, combining as it did intellectual fireworks with physical glories, fades to the embers of mutual affection and understanding. Perhaps the finest testament to Bodanis' skill as a narrator is the fact that Emilie's premature death from childbirth, when it comes, is deeply moving. At that moment, something wonderful was taken from the world and Bodanis' skill lies in making us feel that loss even after the passage of two and a half centuries.

Bodanis' touch is sure and slips only twice, on small technical matters. The exposition on Liebenitz' method to solve the problem of curvature is probably more confusing than helpful, and would be easier to understand in the normal language of calculus. And when Emilie cleverly purchases, for a lump sum, the rights to future tax revenues this is described as the first instance of derivatives trading whereas in fact it's an example of using net present value (of a future income stream) to determine the correct present price of an asset (or in this case, a lower-than-correct price, to ensure that the nimble Emilie can make a handsome profit from the intellectually indolent aristocrats who owned the rights to tax the French populace). But these are tiny cavils and in no way detract from this marvelous little book.

For anyone curious about Voltaire (the man who brought us Micromegas and Candide), the birth of the Enlightenment, and the extraordinary person that was Emilie du Chatalet, this is a book that must be read for both pleasure and education.

Emilie du Chatelet was a most interesting women for her time, or for any time. A member of the French aristocracy she was adored by her father and taught unwomanly things like sword fighting, riding, languages, literature and mathematics. She also liked to dance, was a passable performer on the harpsichord, sang opera, and was an amateur actress.

As a scientist she is remembered as a footnote, if you will, to the other scientists of the day. She did research into fire, and developed theories of what is now called infra-red radiation. In the year of her death she completed the work regarded as her outstanding achievement: her translation into French, with her own commentary, of Newton's celebrated Principia Mathematica, including her derivation from its principles of mechanics the notion of conservation of energy.

She also led a life we would consider somewhat scandalous. After dutifully presenting her husband with the children expected of an arranged marriage they agreed to live apart with each taking other lovers.

I was struck with the fact that she died in 1749. Had she been born fifty years later, it is likely that she would have faced the guillotine like so many others.

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.

Pleasant reading but uncritical acceptance of many undocumented anecdotes about Emilie du Chatelet regarding her sentimental life and superficial description of her mathematical and scientific research. Judith Zinsser book about the same subject being in my opinion a better biograhy.

I became interested in Emilie du Chatelet after reading a review of Judith Zinsser's biography on her. However, I ended up picking up Bodanis's book instead because it was written in a more welcoming style than Zinsser's drier account.

Emilie du Chatelet is a fascinating woman whose story needs little embelishment to be an entertaining read, but Bodanis's sense of humor and intimate approach to writing her biography do make it more intersting and readable. While he often goes out on a limb making assumptions about people's thoughts and actions that surely weren't documented, I don't think he was too unrealistic or uncalled for in doing so.

Bodanis also does a fine job intertwining the biography of Voltaire into Emilie's story, bringing to light Voltaire's little-known in science. He elegantly ties their lives into the climate of the Enlightenment and the events leading up to the French Revolution. In doing so, he introduces a tapestry of characters that played a key role in history as well as in Emilie and Voltaire's lives.

Absent from this book is anything more than a glossing-over of Emilie's scientific and mathematical contributions. Yet I can understand why this was done-- the light narrative of the book would have been bogged down by in-depth calculations and explainations that some readers may not be interested in or understand. Nevertheless, as a woman who loves math and science I was disappointed that Bodanis didn't go into greater detail here.

It's not often that I read more than one book on a particular person or subject (there are just too many interesting things to learn in this world), but now I'm eager to read more about Emile du Chatelet and will be picking up Judith Zinsser's more serious and detailed book soon. A quick and engaging read, Passionate Minds is an excellent introduction to this amazing lady.

I must thoroughly agree with the Publisher's Weekly reviewer of this book. Although it promises to deliver sensational events such as hot love affairs and outrageous behavior in addition to enlightening us about the brilliance of Voltaire and the genius of Emilie du Chatelet, this writer cannot live up to his own book's expectations or his clear attempt to pen a bestseller. What I felt I was getting was the diary entries of a peeping Tom who was busy sticking his nose into the sordid soap opera that was the "great love affair of the Enlightenment." I never had a sense that I was in the presence of a brilliant woman. Rather, Emilie comes off as a hedonistic and conflicted female, fatally insecure, and overshadowed by the even more insecure and narcissistic Voltaire. Although lots of information is imparted between the covers of this book, it never seems to gel into a cohesive or gripping whole, and I was left feeling flat, not only about the featured on-again, off-again eighteenth-century rock-star couple, but about eighteenth-century France altogether. No one seemed worth reading about. The lot of these folks apparently were stuck in their petty, class conscious, foolish ways, fawning over the court, slapping around the general population who weren't upper class, and generally being idiots. Perhaps the best I can say about this work is that it redeems science and rational thinking as well as the integrity of the individual, but only in a backhanded way. I'm afraid most readers will give up on this endless recounting of flaming passions and pettifoggery before getting halfway through. Lucky would they be too because they would happily miss the glaring and unforgivable fragment on p. 163: "But not only was the water cleaner in Cirey. There was also something more to Emilie's innovation." Editor please!

Émilie du Châtelet was a mathematician, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher. She and Voltaire were lovers for several years, and they remained devoted friends for the remainder of Émilie's short life.

This is a story a writer of fiction would hardly dare invent. Romance, political intrigue, duels, financial scams, complex machinations with royalty and their hangers-on; Émilie's life would seem extraordinary even without her significant contributions in mathematics and physics. This is a woman who translated Newton's "Principia", not just from Latin into French, but also casting the equations into a far more comprehensible calculus. And she did that in the last months of her life, during the pregnancy that she sensed would kill her.

Bodanis has an easy, highly readable style. The book has fairly copious end notes, and while I found myself wishing for more details of Émilie's work, they would have made the book much longer, and perhaps diluted its effect. He includes a long and inviting list of further reading. The one thing I felt the book lacked was an index; there are so many people named, and sometimes I wished I could quickly find where they'd appeared earlier in the book.

After her death, Voltaire wrote of her,

"I have lost the half of myself--a soul for which mine was made".

The story of this astonishing woman moved me more than many a novel.

If you are a physical science teacher, you absolutely must devour this extraordinary work. Not only is the work perfect for people who wish to read about the relevant historical figures, and the time of the enlightenment, but there were a few, very simple experimental aspects explored, which I have successfully used in the High School Physics classroom. Students certainly take to the historical background, and of course blending in the very human nature of Voltaire, and Emilie du Chatelet, and how exceptionally close they came to cracking some serious scientific nuts is beyond intriguing.

If you have only a mild interest in science, I would heartily recommend the reading of this work - even if it sits on your nightstand, and is read 10 minutes an evening.

CAVEAT !! You might become so enthralled, that you do NOT put down the book, and continue to read through the night. This might not be good for your next day efficiency at work, and so I have a solution. I suggest that you purchase the book on a Friday evening, and give yourself this two additional evening cushion.

Bodanis is an excellent writer, and while I might sound like I am simply choosing words from my own lexicon of hyperbole, it simply read well. I believe that I have gained from this experience both as a teacher of Physics, but as well Philosophy.

This experience has had me look up his previous work, E = mc^2 and I hope to write a favourable review on that work later this month too.

This book gave me a fascinating piece of history that I was completly uninformed on. It is fascinating learning the details regarding life in a period that is completly foreign to our culture. It is also fascinating to find out the contributions that women made in science at a time when it was believed that women were completly ignorant, and every effort was made to keep them so.