Ce diable d'homme — Season 1, Episode 4: Episode 4
Comedy, Family, Drama, Documentary • 55 min • 1 season, 6 episodes
Episode synopsis
Barred from Versailles, Voltaire has only one refuge left: Potsdam, where Frederick II invites him. He goes there, resolved to end his days at the sovereign’s court, and is welcomed with great honors. But things soon sour: Voltaire grumbles, demands favors, blunders repeatedly, speculates on currency, and attacks Maupertuis, one of Frederick’s protégés. He falls into disgrace. When he finally receives permission to leave Prussia, he takes Frederick’s mediocre poems to publish them and take revenge by making Europe laugh. Caught, he escapes, is seized again, imprisoned, and threatened with death. He eventually returns the poems and settles in Switzerland, far from tyrants. Barely has he arrived when news of the Lisbon earthquake spreads. The fanatically Catholic capital is destroyed. The catastrophe inspires his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, the fiercest of his masterpieces.
About Ce diable d'homme
This devil of a man plunges the viewer into the very heart of the Voltaire whirlwind, that incandescent mind who shook his century. The series follows his meteoric rise, his exiles, his battles and flashes of genius, in a Europe still tightly bound by absolutism. We discover an unbowed, charming, formidable man whose pen makes ministers, kings and fanatics tremble. Between glittering salons, damp prisons and passionate loves, Voltaire crosses the Age of Enlightenment like a meteor. Each episode reveals a confrontation, a flight, a victory wrested through the sheer force of intellect. Carried by elegant direction and a sweeping, novelistic energy, the series paints a vibrant portrait of a fighter for freedom. A journey into the life of a man who never stopped thinking, loving and provoking.