Voltaire

French philosopher, writer, and dramatist

• Born: November 21, 1694
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 30, 1778
• Place of death: Paris, France

Voltaire encompassed in his work both extremes of Enlightenment rationalism: He began his career as an optimist, but he later rejected this philosophy in disgust and brilliantly argued the limitations of reason. He wrote prolifically in all literary forms and commented critically on prevailing social conditions and conventions.

Early Life

Voltaire (vahl-tehr) was born François-Marie Arouet on November 21, 1694, in Paris. His father had migrated to the capital from Poitou and prospered there. He held a minor post in the treasury. Arouet was educated at the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, and many years later the Jesuits were to be the objects of savage satire in his masterpiece Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (1759; Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759; also as Candide: Or, The Optimist, 1762; also as Candide: Or, Optimism, 1947). Arouet was trained in the law, which he abandoned. As a young man, during the first quarter of the century, Arouet already strongly exhibited two traits that have come to be associated with the Enlightenment: wit and skepticism. Louis XIV ruled France until 1715, and the insouciant Arouet and his circle of friends delighted in poking fun at the pretentious backwardness of the Sun King’s court.

In 1716, when Arouet was twenty-two, his political satires prompted the first of his several exiles, in this instance to Sully-sur-Loire. He was, however, unrepentant: In 1717, more satirical verses on the aristocracy caused his imprisonment by lettre de cachet (without trial). During his eleven months in the Bastille, Voltaire, like so many imprisoned writers before him, practiced his craft. He wrote a tragedy, Œdipe (pr. 1718, pb. 1719; Oedipus, 1761), which was a great success on the stage following his release. A year later, when Oedipus came out in print, the author took the name Voltaire, an approximate anagram of Arouet. Such was his fame, however, that the pseudonym afforded him little chance of anonymity. He came to be known as François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire.

Life’s Work

By the age of thirty, Voltaire was well established as a man of letters. For the next fifty years, he produced an enormous and varied body of work; he wrote tragic plays, satires in prose and verse, histories, philosophical tales, essays, pamphlets, encyclopedia entries, and letters by the thousands. Also by the age of thirty, he was a wealthy man. He speculated in the Compagnie Française des Indes (French East India Company) with great success, and his fortune grew over the years. Voltaire’s personal wealth afforded him an independence of which few writers of the period could boast.

Still, his penchant for religious and political controversy had him in trouble again by 1726. The chevalier de Rohan caused him to be beaten and incarcerated in the Bastille for a second time. He was subsequently exiled to England, where he spent most of the period from 1726 to 1729. There, he learned the English language, read widely in the literature, and became the companion of Alexander Pope and other wits of Queen Anne’s era. La Henriade (1728; Henriade, 1732), his epic of Henry IV, was published during this period, and his sojourn in Britain would eventually produce Lettres philosophiques (1734; originally published in English as Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733). Voltaire’s great achievement during the years immediately following his return to France was his Histoire de Charles XII (1731; The History of Charles XII, 1732). This account of the Swedish monarch is often characterized as the first modern history.

Letters Concerning the English Nation implicitly attacked French institutions through its approbation of English institutions. For example, Voltaire wittily suggested that, despite the manifest benefits of inoculation against smallpox, the French rejected the practice simply because the English adopted it first. Again, Voltaire angered powerful enemies. His book was burned, he barely escaped imprisonment, and he was forced to flee Paris for a third time.

Voltaire settled at Cirey in Lorraine, first as the guest and eventually as the companion of the brilliant Marquise du Châtelet. There, for the next fifteen years, he continued to write in all genres, but, having become acquainted with the works of John Locke and David Hume, he turned increasingly to philosophical and scientific subjects. As revealed in his Discours en vers sur l’homme (1738; Discourses in Verse on Man, 1764), Voltaire embraced the philosophy of optimism during these years, believing that reason alone could lead humanity out of the darkness and into the millennium. Gradually, his reputation was rehabilitated within court circles. He had been given permission to return to Paris in 1735, he was named official historiographer of France in 1743, and he was elected to the French Academy in 1746. In 1748, he published his first philosophical tale, Zadig: Ou, La Destinée, Histoire orientale (originally as Memnon: Histoire orientale, 1747; Zadig: Or, The Book of Fate, 1749).

The Marquise du Châtelet died in 1749. The next year, believing that Louis XV had offered him insufficient patronage, Voltaire joined the court of Frederick the Great at Potsdam. For three years, Voltaire lived in great comfort and luxury, completing during this period Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV, 1752). Voltaire and the Prussian king, however, were not well suited temperamentally. They quarreled, and the inevitable breach occurred in 1753. Shortly thereafter, Voltaire purchased Les Délices (the delights), a château in Switzerland, near Geneva. He stayed in the good graces of the Swiss for exactly as long as he had managed in Prussia—three years.

The Swiss perceived Voltaire’s Encyclopedia entry on Geneva as having a contemptuous tone. The national pride of his hosts was wounded, and he left the country. He bought the great estate Ferney, on French soil but just across the Swiss frontier. This was the perfect retreat for a controversialist with Voltaire’s volatile history; if the French authorities decided to act against him again, he could simply slip across the border. For the last twenty years of his life, Voltaire used the Ferney estate as the base from which he tirelessly launched his literary attacks upon superstition, error, and ignorance. He employed a variety of pseudonyms but made no effort to disguise his inimitable style and manner. This transparent device gave the authorities, by then indulgent and weary of their repeated attempts to muzzle Voltaire, an excuse not to prosecute him.

The decade of the 1750’s wrought a change in the middle-aged Voltaire’s attitudes far greater than any change he had undergone previously. He was deeply affected by the Great Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755. In this horrendous tragedy, perhaps as many as fifty thousand people died, many while worshiping in packed churches on All Saints’ Day. Voltaire began to reexamine his concept of a rational universe, functioning according to fixed laws that people could apprehend and to which they could adapt themselves. He was now repulsed by the optimists’ theory that (to overstate it only slightly) this is the best of all possible worlds, and, therefore, any natural occurrence must ultimately be for the best. His first bitter attack on optimism was Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756; Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake, 1764). His rebuttal of this smug philosophy culminated in his masterpiece of dark comedy, Candide.

Voltaire claimed to have written this wildly improbable picaresque novel in three days during 1758. It was published in 1759 and was immensely popular; it averaged two new editions a year for the next twenty years. The novel’s character of Pangloss, tutor to the incredibly callow hero, is a caricature of the optimistic philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian von Wolff, although Voltaire’s temperamental archenemy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fancied himself to be the real model for Pangloss. Candide’s satire is by no means limited to optimism, and the novel reveals the best and worst of its author’s traits of character. Voltaire lashes out at his lifelong enemies, superstition, bigotry, extremism, hypocrisy, and (despite accounting for most of his personal wealth) colonialism. Also readily apparent in the text are its author’s anti-Semitism, his anti-Catholicism, and his sexism.

The major work of Voltaire’s later years was Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764; A Philosophical Dictionary for the Pocket, 1765). He also involved himself deeply in the day-to-day operations of Ferney, and he maintained his voluminous correspondence with virtually all the eminent persons of Europe. For the first time in almost three decades, Voltaire returned to Paris in 1778. He was afforded a tumultuous hero’s welcome, but he was eighty-three and ill; the celebration was too much for him in his fragile state of health. He died on May 30, within weeks of his triumphal return to the city of his birth.

Significance

Despite the Church’s opposition to Voltaire’s burial in sanctified ground, he was secretly—and inappropriately, some have suggested—interred at a convent outside the city. A decade later came the French Revolution, and Voltaire’s enemies ostensibly became those of the French people as well. He was exhumed and made a second grand entrance into Paris, where he was reburied in the Panthéon next to Rousseau, an irony he might have enjoyed.

Voltaire’s work is extremely varied and sometimes self-contradictory. His sentiments are often more personal than universal. He had had bad experiences with Jesuit priests, Protestant enthusiasts, and Jewish businessmen; hence, Jesuits, Calvinists, and Jews are mercilessly lampooned in Candide. He apparently had good experiences with Anabaptists, and the generous and selfless Anabaptist Jacques, in his brief appearance, is one of the few admirable characters in the novel. Voltaire had been cured of optimism by the horror of the Lisbon earthquake, the savagery of the Seven Years’ War, and the reversals in his personal life, yet he did not completely give way to pessimism. His philosophy in his later years seems to have been a qualified meliorism, as characterized by his famous injunction that every individual should tend his (or her) own garden.

The famous and spurious quotation, “I disagree with everything you say, but I shall fight to the death for your right to say it,” will be forever associated with Voltaire’s memory. Although he probably never uttered these precise words, they are an admirable summation of the way he lived his intellectual life. The surviving pictures of Voltaire, most in old age, represent him as thin, sharp-featured, and sardonic. He is the very embodiment of one aspect of the neoclassical period—skeptical, irreverent, and valuing personal freedom above all other things.

Bibliography

Aldington, Richard. Voltaire. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925. One of the standard works of critical biography. Treats both the life of Voltaire and his career as poet, dramatist, literary critic, historian, biographer, philosopher, pamphleteer, and correspondent. Contains a chronological listing of Voltaire’s works by genre, followed by a list of the English translations (up to that time) and a selected bibliography.

Carlson, Marvin. Voltaire and the Theater of the Eighteenth Century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Focuses on Voltaire’s theatrical works, analyzing the content of his plays and describing how he was involved in acting, staging, and other aspects of production. Recounts Voltaire’s experiences in England and Germany and describes the characteristics of theater in these countries and in other European nations during the eighteenth century.

Davidson, Ian. Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1773-1778. London: Atlantic, 2004. Focuses on Voltaire’s years in Geneva and Ferney, describing his life, companions, and community activities. Argues that before his exile, Voltaire was interested in establishing his reputation and making money, but during his exile he became a champion of human rights, justice, and judicial reform. Well written and researched, based in part on Voltaire’s correspondence.

Gay, Peter. Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959. An intellectual history that attempts to trace the psychological, social, and intellectual origins of Voltaire’s ideas. Portrays Voltaire’s politics as realistic and humanely relativistic; argues that Voltaire’s humane sympathies failed him only in the case of his anti-Semitism.

Lanson, Gustave. Voltaire. Translated by Robert A. Wagoner with an introduction by Peter Gay. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966. This brief survey of Voltaire’s life and work by a famous French literary historian was originally published in 1906 in French. It is an excellent introductory volume, which distinguishes between Voltaire’s deeply held convictions and his more casual and whimsical arguments.

Mason, Haydn. Voltaire: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Organized according to seven periods in Voltaire’s life. The author states that he has not attempted a comprehensive treatment of the life, because that would easily require ten volumes. Instead, he has attempted to capture Voltaire’s essence as revealed under the pressure of circumstances. Contains a helpful chronology and a selected bibliography.

Torrey, Norman L. The Spirit of Voltaire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Argues for and seeks to document Voltaire’s moral integrity, while granting that a certain duplicity was a necessary condition of his life and work. Concludes with a long chapter on Voltaire’s religion, probing whether he was a Deist, a mystic, or a Humanist.