Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris on November 21, 1694, the youngest surviving child of François Arouet, a prosperous notary, and Marie Marguerite Daumard. The family belonged to the comfortable professional class of the capital, and the boy grew up expecting a career in law ^[1].

From 1704 to 1711 he studied at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, the Jesuit school that educated much of the French elite. The fathers gave him a thorough grounding in Latin, rhetoric, and classical theater, and he later credited them with teaching him to love literature even as he came to reject much of the church they served ^[2]. His godfather, the abbé de Châteauneuf, introduced the teenager to the freethinking circles of Parisian society, including the salon of the celebrated courtesan Ninon de l'Enclos, who left the promising boy a small legacy to buy books ^[1].

His father wanted a lawyer. The son wanted to write. After a brief, unhappy period studying law and a short posting as secretary to the French ambassador in The Hague, which ended when a romance with a young Protestant refugee scandalized his employers, the young Arouet committed himself to poetry and the theater ^[3].

Sharp verses about the regent Philippe d'Orléans, some of them wrongly attributed to him, landed the young poet in the Bastille in May 1717. He spent eleven months there, and during the confinement he worked on his first tragedy, Oedipe, and began an epic poem on King Henri IV ^[2]. When Oedipe opened in Paris in November 1718 it was a triumph, and its author signed the work with a new name: Arouet de Voltaire, soon simply Voltaire. The origin of the name is still debated; a common explanation treats it as an anagram of Arouet le jeune in the spelling conventions of the day ^[1].

A quarrel changed his life. In 1726 the chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman he had traded insults with, had his servants beat Voltaire in the street. When the writer sought satisfaction, the authorities protected the aristocrat and sent Voltaire back to the Bastille. He was released on condition that he leave France, and he chose England ^[3].

The two and a half years he spent in England, roughly 1726 to 1728, transformed him. He learned English, met Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, attended Isaac Newton's funeral rites at Westminster Abbey, and studied a society where, as he saw it, merchants were respected, many faiths coexisted, and writers could publish with relative freedom ^[4]. The result was the Letters Concerning the English Nation, published in English in 1733 and in French as the Lettres philosophiques in 1734. The French edition, with its implicit indictment of French absolutism and clerical power, was condemned and publicly burned, and its author had to flee Paris once more ^[2].

Voltaire found refuge at Cirey in Champagne, the château of Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, a mathematician and physicist of the first rank. From 1734 the two lived and worked together, assembling a large library and a physics laboratory and turning a remote country house into one of the intellectual centers of Europe ^[5].

The partnership was scientific as well as romantic. Both entered the Paris Academy of Sciences essay competition on the nature of fire in 1738, and that same year Voltaire published the Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, a book that did much to spread Newtonian science in France against the entrenched Cartesian tradition. Du Châtelet, for her part, produced the French translation of Newton's Principia that is still standard ^[5].

Voltaire kept writing for the stage and began the historical projects that occupied him for decades, including work that became The Age of Louis XIV. He also enjoyed a period of official favor: elected to the Académie française in 1746 and appointed royal historiographer, thanks in part to friends at court including Madame de Pompadour ^[2]. The Cirey years ended in grief. Du Châtelet died in September 1749, days after giving birth, and Voltaire was shattered ^[5].

Any account of Voltaire achievements has to reckon with sheer range. He wrote more than fifty plays, epic and light verse, novels and tales, histories, scientific popularization, pamphlets beyond counting, and some twenty thousand surviving letters ^[1]. In his own century his fame rested chiefly on tragedies such as Zaïre (1732) and on the Henriade, his epic on Henri IV. Posterity ranks other works higher.

His histories broke new ground. The Age of Louis XIV (1751) treated a reign as a portrait of a whole civilization, covering arts, sciences, and manners rather than only battles and treaties, and the Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756) attempted a history of the world that included China, India, and the Islamic lands, a deliberate rebuke to histories that began and ended with biblical Europe ^[6].

Then there is Candide, or Optimism, published in 1759. The short tale follows a naive young man through war, earthquake, slavery, and disaster, demolishing the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds, a position associated with the philosopher Leibniz. Written partly in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Seven Years' War, it remains his most read book, and its closing advice, that we must cultivate our garden, is among the most quoted lines of the eighteenth century ^[4]. The Philosophical Dictionary of 1764, a portable arsenal of short polemical articles, distilled his campaign against superstition and fanaticism into a form anyone could carry, and anyone could be arrested for carrying ^[2].

After Cirey, Voltaire accepted a long-standing invitation from Frederick II of Prussia and moved to Potsdam in 1750. The philosopher and the king admired each other and quarreled magnificently. Voltaire's financial speculations, and a pamphlet mocking Maupertuis, the president of Frederick's academy, ended the arrangement; he left Prussia in 1753 and was briefly detained in Frankfurt on the king's orders ^[3].

Barred in practice from Paris, he bought property near Geneva and then, in 1758, the estate of Ferney just inside the French border. Ferney was chosen with care: close enough to Switzerland to slip across if France threatened, close enough to France to return if Geneva did. There he lived for twenty years as a kind of independent power, farming, building, establishing a watchmaking industry for his villagers, and receiving visitors from all over Europe, who called on him as the patriarch of Ferney ^[1].

From Ferney he waged the campaigns that made him more than a man of letters. The most famous concerned Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse broken on the wheel in 1762 after being convicted, on flimsy evidence, of murdering his son to prevent a conversion to Catholicism. Voltaire investigated, mobilized opinion across Europe, and pressed the case until a royal council annulled the verdict and rehabilitated Calas in 1765 ^[7]. He fought similar battles for the Sirven family and for the memory of the chevalier de La Barre, a young nobleman executed in 1766 for blasphemy. The Treatise on Tolerance of 1763, written out of the Calas affair, argued that religious persecution disgraced both church and state, and his letters of these years often carried the war cry Écrasez l'infâme, crush the infamous thing, by which he meant fanaticism and the abuses done in religion's name ^[7].

Old age barely slowed him. Through his seventies Voltaire kept up a torrent of tales, dialogues, pamphlets, and correspondence, often publishing anonymously or under invented names to dodge the censors, then cheerfully denying authorship of works everyone knew were his ^[2]. He corresponded with monarchs, including Catherine II of Russia, and with the editors of the Encyclopédie, the great collective project of the French Enlightenment to which he contributed articles ^[6].

In February 1778, aged eighty-three, he returned to Paris for the first time in nearly three decades to attend rehearsals of his last tragedy, Irène. The city gave him a reception verging on delirium: crowds followed his carriage, and at the Comédie-Française on March 30 his bust was crowned with laurel on stage while the audience cheered the old man in his box ^[1].

The excitement of the visit exhausted him. Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778. Because the church refused Christian burial to the notorious critic of Christianity, his friends removed the body quietly and had him buried at the abbey of Scellières in Champagne before the prohibition could arrive. In July 1791 the revolutionary government brought his remains back to Paris in a massive public procession and placed them in the Panthéon, where they lie today ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Voltaire, and why a writer dead for two and a half centuries still matters, usually gets an answer about freedom. He did more than perhaps any other single author to make religious toleration, freedom of expression, and the reform of criminal justice into causes that educated Europe felt obliged to defend ^[7]. The famous sentence about defending to the death your right to say what I disapprove of is not his; it was coined in 1906 by the English biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall to summarize his attitude, and the fact that it is so often attributed to him shows how completely his name became shorthand for the principle ^[4].

His reputation has never been simple. The revolutionaries claimed him, the church condemned him, and the nineteenth century argued over him; Victor Hugo declared that to name Voltaire was to characterize the entire eighteenth century. Modern scholars also confront the ugly passages in his work, including hostile remarks about Jews and his financial links to Atlantic commerce, and any honest Voltaire biography now weighs these against his campaigns for the persecuted ^[6].

The body of work endures on its own terms. Candide is read in schools and staged as Leonard Bernstein's operetta, the Treatise on Tolerance returned to the French bestseller lists after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, and the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford completed the first full critical edition of his writings, over two hundred volumes, in 2021 ^[8]. Few writers have left a sharper lesson: that wit, stubbornness, and a fast pen can be weapons against cruelty.