Voltaire

Voltaire, assumed name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French writer and intellectual, who was one of the leaders of the Enlightenment.

Voltaire was born in Paris on November 21, 1694, the son of a notary. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège de Louis-le-Grand. His career may be divided into two periods.

Voltaire quickly chose literature as his career. He became known in the Paris salons as a brilliant and sarcastic wit. A number of his writings, in particular a lampoon against the French regent Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, led to imprisonment in the Bastille. During his 11 months there, Voltaire wrote his first tragedy, Oedipe (Oedipus), which was performed to great acclaim in 1718, and began an epic poem on Henry IV of France, of which an early version was printed anonymously in Geneva under the title Poème sur la Ligue (Poem on the League, 1723). In his poem Le Pour et le Contre (For and Against, 1722), Voltaire expressed both his anti-Christian views and his belief in a Supreme Being (deism). After a quarrel with an illustrious nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan, Voltaire was again imprisoned in the Bastille, before going into exile in England, where he quickly mastered the language and wrote two noteworthy essays in English, one on epic poetry and the other on the history of the French civil wars. After much opposition from the French government, an expanded edition of the Poème sur la Ligue was published under the title La Henriade (The Epic of Henry IV, 1728).

Voltaire returned to France in 1728. During the next few years he lived in Paris, where he wrote the Lettres sur les Anglais (Letters on the English Nation, 1734), republished in the same year, with the addition of a letter on the 17th-century religious writer Blaise Pascal, as Lettres Philosophiques (Philosophical Letters). These provided the French reader with object lessons on how intellectual, religious, and political matters should be conducted, and contain an eloquent defence of civil liberty and religious toleration. The work brought Voltaire into conflict with the authorities and he was forced to take refuge in the independent duchy of Lorraine, where he formed an intimate relationship with the aristocratic and learned Marquise du Châtelet, who exerted a strong intellectual influence on him. Voltaire’s stay with the marquise at Cirey was a period of intense literary activity. As well as plays, stories, satires, and light verse, Voltaire wrote the Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton (Elements of Newton’s Philosophy, 1737), in which he continued the pioneering work he had begun in the Lettres sur les Anglais of explaining Newton‘s theory of gravitational attraction to an obstinately resistant French public. He often travelled to Paris and through the influence of the Marquise de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, he became a court favourite. He was appointed historiographer of France, then a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber; finally, in 1746, he was elected to the Académie Française (see Institut de France). Following the death of the Marquise du Châtelet in 1749, Voltaire accepted a long-standing invitation from Frederick II of Prussia to become permanently resident at the Prussian court. He went to Berlin in 1750 but left after two years as his somewhat acid wit clashed with the king’s autocratic temper, and led to frequent disputes.

Voltaire finally settled at Ferney, on the Swiss border, in 1758, where he completed his most ambitious work, the Essai sur l’Histoire Générale et sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on General History and on the Customs and the Character of Nations, 1756), in which he maintains his belief in the existence of a God but attacks supernaturalism and denounces religion and the power of the clergy. After settling in Ferney, Voltaire wrote several philosophical poems, including the Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, 1756), a bitter protest at the belief, encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, that the earthquake which had devastated Lisbon the previous year was a divinely inspired punishment visited on the city for its immorality. To this period belong the majority of his contes philosophiques (philosophical tales), the most famous of which, Candide (1759), rejects specious philosophical attempts (notably by the disciples of the German philosopher Leibniz) to explain away evil. Its often-quoted conclusion, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (“We must cultivate our garden”), is not a call for resignation, but for positive action, and was followed by a period in which Voltaire himself led a vitriolic campaign against the “Infamous Beast” of the Church. Voltaire involved other, younger Philosophes (a group of 18th-century writers; see French Literature: The 18th century) in this campaign, but their overt atheism and materialism repelled him, and he attempted to counter their arguments in works like Le Philosophe Ignorant (The Ignorant Philosopher, 1766) and Histoire de Jenni (The Story of Johnny, 1775).

Voltaire’s lifelong ambition was to be hailed as the legitimate successor to the great 17th-century dramatist, Jean Racine, and throughout his long career he wrote numerous tragedies, including Zaire (1732) and Mahomet (1741), which were performed at the Comédie-Française. The apotheosis of his involvement with the theatre came when, old and sick, he returned to Paris in order to see a bust of himself crowned with laurels on the stage of that great institution. Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778.