Voltaire

1. Who was Voltaire, and why does he matter?

Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), a French writer, philosopher, historian, and satirist who became the most famous intellectual in Europe during the eighteenth century. He matters for two intertwined reasons: the sheer scale and variety of his output, and the consistent use he made of it to attack injustice, superstition, and intolerance. He wrote plays, epic poems, histories, philosophical tales, pamphlets, essays, and over 20,000 letters. His targets were the Catholic Church, judicial torture, religious persecution, and the arbitrary power of the French monarchy. His influence reached far beyond France: the founders of both the American and French Revolutions read and cited him. His rallying cry "écrasez l'infâme" — crush the infamous thing, by which he meant fanaticism and institutional cruelty — became a slogan of the entire Enlightenment.

2. What were Voltaire's origins and early life?

Voltaire was born in Paris on 21 November 1694, the youngest surviving child of a prosperous notary. His mother died when he was seven. He received an excellent classical education at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit school where he learned Latin and Greek and developed a lifelong love of theatre. His father wanted him to become a lawyer. Voltaire had other ideas. He frequented the free-thinking, libertine society of the Temple district in Paris, where aristocrats and intellectuals gathered to write and argue, and began composing satirical verse. He was already developing the sharp wit and reckless courage that would define his career — and bring him into repeated conflict with authority.

3. How did Voltaire first come to prominence, and what were his early troubles?

Voltaire's first serious trouble with the law came in 1717, when satirical verses he had written mocking the Regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, led to his imprisonment in the Bastille. He spent nearly eleven months there, during which he worked on his epic poem the Henriade and on the tragedy Oedipe. When Oedipe was staged after his release in 1718, it was a sensation, making him overnight the most celebrated writer in France. It was also around this time that he adopted the name Voltaire — an anagram of his Latin name Arouet — shedding his bourgeois family name in favour of something that sounded aristocratic and invented. His early fame was considerable, but so was his talent for making enemies in high places.

4. What happened with the Chevalier de Rohan, and why was England important?

In 1726, a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan, a minor but well-connected nobleman, changed the course of Voltaire's life. After Voltaire responded sharply to an insult, the Rohan family used a lettre de cachet — a royal warrant signed by the king — to have him thrown in the Bastille without trial. Rather than face indefinite imprisonment, Voltaire proposed his own exile to England, and the authorities agreed. He spent roughly three years in England, where he was transformed. He met the writers Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, studied the philosophy of John Locke and the science of Isaac Newton, and was struck by the relative freedom of speech and religious tolerance he observed under England's constitutional monarchy. He returned to France with a new intellectual programme, and a book to write about it.

5. What were the Lettres Philosophiques, and why did they cause such an uproar?

Published in 1734 under the title Letters Concerning the English Nation, the Lettres Philosophiques were Voltaire's account of English society and thought. The book praised England's constitutional monarchy, its religious tolerance, its flourishing philosophy and science, and the ideas of Locke and Newton. The implication was unmistakable: France, by contrast, was backward, tyrannical, and priest-ridden. The French authorities condemned the book immediately, ordered it burned, and issued a warrant for Voltaire's arrest. He fled Paris and found refuge at the château of Cirey in the borderlands between Champagne and Lorraine, the estate of Émilie du Châtelet, a brilliant mathematician and physicist who became his companion and intellectual collaborator for the next fifteen years.

6. Who was Émilie du Châtelet, and what was her relationship with Voltaire?

Émilie du Châtelet — full name Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet — was one of the most remarkable women of the Enlightenment: a scientist who translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into French, a mathematician of serious standing, and a philosopher in her own right. She was twelve years younger than Voltaire, married with children, and her husband largely accepted the arrangement. At Cirey, the two collected an extraordinary library of some 21,000 books and conducted scientific experiments together in a purpose-built laboratory, while Voltaire also wrote history, drama, and philosophy. Their relationship was intensely intellectual as well as romantic. Émilie du Châtelet died in 1749 from complications following childbirth, and Voltaire was devastated by her loss.

7. What was Voltaire's relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia?

The Prussian king Frederick II, who came to power in 1740, was an admirer of Voltaire from youth and began corresponding with him before he became king. He cultivated Voltaire as a symbol of Enlightened Europe, and after the death of Émilie du Châtelet, Voltaire accepted Frederick's long-standing invitation and moved to the royal court at Potsdam in 1750. The arrangement was dazzling on paper: the greatest writer in Europe residing at the court of the most powerful king in Germany. In practice, the relationship unravelled rapidly. Voltaire was officially employed to correct Frederick's French poetry, a task he privately found tedious. He became embroiled in financial disputes and feuds with other courtiers. When he wrote a savage satirical pamphlet mocking the president of Frederick's Academy of Sciences, Frederick had it publicly burned. Voltaire left Prussia in 1753 in poor standing, and was briefly detained in Frankfurt on Frederick's orders before he was allowed to go free.

8. What was Candide, and what made it so significant?

Candide, published in 1759, is Voltaire's most enduring work, a short satirical novel that travels at breakneck pace through disasters, wars, atrocities, and philosophical absurdities. The story follows the naïve young Candide, who has been taught by his tutor Pangloss — a parody of the philosopher Leibniz — that this is "the best of all possible worlds." Every catastrophe Candide encounters, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the brutalities of the Inquisition to the horrors of war, demolishes that comfortable philosophy. The book was a direct attack on the doctrine of optimistic determinism and, more broadly, on all attempts to rationalise human suffering as part of a divine plan. It was banned almost everywhere and sold in enormous numbers. Its famous ending — the conclusion that one must "cultivate one's own garden" rather than pursue empty abstractions — has been read as a call to practical action over philosophical dreaming ever since.

9. What was the Calas affair, and what does it reveal about Voltaire's later career?

In 1762, a Protestant merchant named Jean Calas was convicted by a Catholic tribunal in Toulouse of murdering his son, allegedly to prevent the young man's conversion to Catholicism. He was tortured on the rack and executed. The evidence was thin, the process deeply influenced by anti-Protestant prejudice, and Voltaire, by then living at Ferney near the Swiss border, took up the case with the full force of his pen and his connections. Over three years he campaigned relentlessly, publishing his Treatise on Tolerance, mobilising public opinion, and pressing legal authorities. In 1765, Calas was posthumously exonerated. The affair became the defining example of Voltaire's later career as a public activist — what he called a philosophe en action — fighting not just with ideas in the abstract but on behalf of real victims of real injustice. He continued defending similar cases, including the Sirven family and the Chevalier de La Barre, for the rest of his life.

10. How did Voltaire's life end, and what is his legacy?

From 1759, Voltaire lived at his estate at Ferney near the French-Swiss border, where he became one of the most famous men in the world, receiving a constant stream of visitors — James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and Casanova among them — and conducting an enormous correspondence with monarchs, philosophers, and reformers across Europe. He was eighty-three when he returned to Paris in early 1778, after an absence of nearly thirty years, to see his last play performed. The reception was overwhelming: crowds lined the streets, and the audience at the Comédie-Française crowned him with laurel. The excitement of the return may have contributed to his death. He died on 30 May 1778. Because he had refused to make a full Catholic confession, the Church denied him burial in Paris, and he was interred quietly outside the city. In 1791, the new Revolutionary government brought his remains back to Paris in a procession that drew an estimated one million people, and reburied him in the Panthéon, where he remains today. No French writer before or since has been so completely identified with the spirit of an age.