biography voltaire

Author of the satirical novella 'Candide,' Voltaire is widely considered one of France's greatest Enlightenment writers.

(1694-1778)

Who Was Voltaire?

Voltaire established himself as one of the leading writers of the Enlightenment. His famed works include the tragic play Zaïre , the historical study The Age of Louis XIV and the satirical novella Candide . Often at odds with French authorities over his politically and religiously charged works, he was twice imprisoned and spent many years in exile. He died shortly after returning to Paris in 1778.

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet to a prosperous family on November 21, 1694, in Paris, France. He was the youngest of five children born to François Arouet and Marie Marguerite d'Aumart. When Voltaire was just seven years old, his mother passed away. Following her death, he grew closer to his free-thinking godfather.

In 1704, Voltaire was enrolled at the Collége Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit secondary school in Paris, where he received a classical education and began showing promise as a writer.

Beliefs and Philosophy

Voltaire, in keeping with other Enlightenment thinkers of the era, was a deist — not by faith, according to him, but rather by reason. He looked favorably on religious tolerance, even though he could be severely critical towards Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

As a vegetarian and an advocate of animal rights, however, Voltaire praised Hinduism, stating Hindus were "[a] peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves."

Major Works

Voltaire wrote poetry and plays, as well as historical and philosophical works. His most well-known poetry includes The Henriade (1723) and The Maid of Orleans , which he started writing in 1730 but never fully completed.

Among the earliest of Voltaire's best-known plays is his adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus , which was first performed in 1718. Voltaire followed with a string of dramatic tragedies, including Mariamne (1724). His Zaïre (1732), written in verse, was something of a departure from previous works: Until that point, Voltaire's tragedies had centered on a fatal flaw in the protagonist's character; however, the tragedy in Zaïre was the result of circumstance. Following Zaïre, Voltaire continued to write tragic plays, including Mahomet (1736) and Nanine (1749).

Voltaire's body of writing also includes the notable historical works The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). In the latter, Voltaire took a unique approach to tracing the progression of world civilization by focusing on social history and the arts.

Voltaire's popular philosophic works took the form of the short stories Micromégas (1752) and Plato's Dream (1756), as well as the famed satirical novella Candide (1759), which is considered Voltaire's greatest work. Candide is filled with philosophical and religious parody, and in the end the characters reject optimism. There is great debate on whether Voltaire was making an actual statement about embracing a pessimistic philosophy or if he was trying to encourage people to be actively involved to improve society.

In 1764, he published another of his acclaimed philosophical works, Dictionnaire philosophique , an encyclopedic dictionary that embraced the concepts of Enlightenment and rejected the ideas of the Roman Catholic Church.

Arrests and Exiles

In 1716, Voltaire was exiled to Tulle for mocking the duc d'Orleans. In 1717, he returned to Paris, only to be arrested and exiled to the Bastille for a year on charges of writing libelous poetry. Voltaire was sent to the Bastille again in 1726, for arguing with the Chevalier de Rohan. This time he was only detained briefly before being exiled to England, where he remained for nearly three years.

The publication of Voltaire's Letters on the English (1733) angered the French church and government, forcing the writer to flee to safer pastures. He spent the next 15 years with his mistress, Émilie du Châtelet, at her husband's home in Cirey-sur-Blaise.

Voltaire moved to Prussia in 1750 as a member of Frederick the Great's court, and spent later years in Geneva and Ferney. By 1778, he was recognized as an icon of the Enlightenment's progressive ideals, and he was given a hero's welcome upon his return to Paris. He died there shortly afterward, on May 30, 1778.

In 1952, researcher and writer Theodore Besterman established a museum devoted to Voltaire in Geneva. He later set about writing a biography of his favorite subject, and following his death in 1976, the Voltaire Foundation was vested permanently at the University of Oxford.

The foundation continued to work toward making the Enlightenment writer's prolific output available to the public. It was later announced that The Oxford Complete Works of Voltaire , the first exhaustive annotated edition of Voltaire’s novels, plays and letters, would expand to 220 volumes by 2020.

In November 2017, during an event to celebrate what would have been Voltaire's 323rd birthday, foundation director Nicholas Cronk explained how the famed writer used inaccuracies to generate attention. Among his fabrications, Voltaire offered up differing dates for his birthday and lied about the identity of his biological father.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Voltaire
• Birth Year: 1694
• Birth date: November 21, 1694
• Birth City: Paris
• Birth Country: France
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Author of the satirical novella 'Candide,' Voltaire is widely considered one of France's greatest Enlightenment writers.
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Collége Louis-le-Grand
• Nationalities
• Occupations
• Death Year: 1778
• Death date: May 30, 1778
• Death City: Paris
• Death Country: France

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François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.

To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history of philosophy, this article will be structured in a particular way. First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. Second, a survey of Voltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach the legacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that his activities reinforced.

1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)

1.2 the english period (1726–1729), 1.3 becoming a philosophe, 1.4 the newton wars (1732–1745), 1.5 from french newtonian to enlightenment philosophe (1745–1755), 1.6 fighting for philosophie (1755–1778), 1.7 voltaire, philosophe icon of enlightenment philosophie (1778–present), 2.1 liberty, 2.2 hedonism, 2.3 skepticism, 2.4 newtonian empirical science, 2.5 toward science without metaphysics, primary literature, primary literature in translation, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries, 1. voltaire’s life: the philosopher as critic and public activist.

Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. His work Lettres philosophiques , published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date, Voltaire’s life in no way pointed him toward the philosophical destiny that he was later to assume. His early orientation toward literature and libertine sociability, however, shaped his philosophical identity in crucial ways.

François-Marie d’Arouet was born in 1694, the fourth of five children, to a well-to-do public official and his well bred aristocratic wife. In its fusion of traditional French aristocratic pedigree with the new wealth and power of royal bureaucratic administration, the d’Arouet family was representative of elite society in France during the reign of Louis XIV. The young François-Marie acquired from his parents the benefits of prosperity and political favor, and from the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris he also acquired a first-class education. François-Marie also acquired an introduction to modern letters from his father who was active in the literary culture of the period both in Paris and at the royal court of Versailles. François senior appears to have enjoyed the company of men of letters, yet his frustration with his son’s ambition to become a writer is notorious. From early in his youth, Voltaire aspired to emulate his idols Molière, Racine, and Corneille and become a playwright, yet Voltaire’s father strenuously opposed the idea, hoping to install his son instead in a position of public authority. First as a law student, then as a lawyer’s apprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaire attempted to fulfill his father’s wishes. But in each case, he ended up abandoning his posts, sometimes amidst scandal.

Escaping from the burdens of these public obligations, Voltaire would retreat into the libertine sociability of Paris. It was here in the 1720s, during the culturally vibrant period of the Regency government between the reigns of Louis XIV and XV (1715–1723), that Voltaire established one dimension of his identity. His wit and congeniality were legendary even as a youth, so he had few difficulties establishing himself as a popular figure in Regency literary circles. He also learned how to play the patronage game so important to those with writerly ambitions. Thanks, therefore, to some artfully composed writings, a couple of well-made contacts, more than a few bon mots , and a little successful investing, especially during John Law’s Mississippi Bubble fiasco, Voltaire was able to establish himself as an independent man of letters in Paris. His literary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of his Oedipe , a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked the French classicism of Racine and Corneille. The play was first performed at the home of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, a sign of Voltaire’s quick ascent to the very pinnacle of elite literary society. Its published title page also announced the new pen name that Voltaire would ever after deploy.

During the Regency, Voltaire circulated widely in elite circles such as those that congregated at Sceaux, but he also cultivated more illicit and libertine sociability as well. This pairing was not at all uncommon during this time, and Voltaire’s intellectual work in the 1720s—a mix of poems and plays that shifted between playful libertinism and serious classicism seemingly without pause—illustrated perfectly the values of pleasure, honnêteté , and good taste that were the watchwords of this cultural milieu. Philosophy was also a part of this mix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shaped by his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke lived in exile in France during the Regency period, and Voltaire was a frequent visitor to La Source, the Englishman’s estate near Orléans. The chateau served as a reunion point for a wide range of intellectuals, and many believe that Voltaire was first introduced to natural philosophy generally, and to the work of Locke and the English Newtonians specifically, at Bolingbroke’s estate. It was certainly true that these ideas, especially in their more deistic and libertine configurations, were at the heart of Bolingbroke’s identity.

Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way, its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile in England between 1726–29. The occasion for his departure was an affair of honor. A very powerful aristocrat, the Duc de Rohan, accused Voltaire of defamation, and in the face of this charge the untitled writer chose to save face and avoid more serious prosecution by leaving the country indefinitely. In the spring of 1726, therefore, Voltaire left Paris for England.

It was during his English period that Voltaire’s transition into his mature philosophe identity began. Bolingbroke, whose address Voltaire left in Paris as his own forwarding address, was one conduit of influence. In particular, Voltaire met through Bolingbroke Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, writers who were at that moment beginning to experiment with the use of literary forms such as the novel and theater in the creation of a new kind of critical public politics. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels , which appeared only months before Voltaire’s arrival, is the most famous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with political criticism. Later the same year Bolingbroke also brought out the first issue of the Craftsman , a political journal that served as the public platform for his circle’s Tory opposition to the Whig oligarchy in England. The Craftsman helped to create English political journalism in the grand style, and for the next three years Voltaire moved in Bolingbroke’s circle, absorbing the culture and sharing in the public political contestation that was percolating all around him.

Voltaire did not restrict himself to Bolingbroke’s circle alone, however. After Bolingbroke, his primary contact in England was a merchant by the name of Everard Fawkener. Fawkener introduced Voltaire to a side of London life entirely different from that offered by Bolingbroke’s circle of Tory intellectuals. This included the Whig circles that Bolingbroke’s group opposed. It also included figures such as Samuel Clarke and other self-proclaimed Newtonians. Voltaire did not meet Newton himself before Sir Isaac’s death in March, 1727, but he did meet his sister—learning from her the famous myth of Newton’s apple, which Voltaire would play a major role in making famous. Voltaire also came to know the other Newtonians in Clarke’s circle, and since he became proficient enough with English to write letters and even fiction in the language, it is very likely that he immersed himself in their writings as well. Voltaire also visited Holland during these years, forming important contacts with Dutch journalists and publishers and meeting Willem’s Gravesande and other Dutch Newtonian savants. Given his other activities, it is also likely that Voltaire frequented the coffeehouses of London even if no firm evidence survives confirming that he did. It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn that Voltaire attended the Newtonian public lectures of John Theophilus Desaguliers or those of one of his rivals. Whatever the precise conduits, all of his encounters in England made Voltaire into a very knowledgeable student of English natural philosophy.

When French officials granted Voltaire permission to re-enter Paris in 1729, he was devoid of pensions and banned from the royal court at Versailles. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. It is no doubt overly grandiose to say with Lord Morley that, “Voltaire left France a poet and returned to it a sage.” It is also an exaggeration to say that he was transformed from a poet into a philosophe while in England. For one, these two sides of Voltaire’s intellectual identity were forever intertwined, and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into the other at any point in his life. But the English years did trigger a transformation in him.

After his return to France, Voltaire worked hard to restore his sources of financial and political support. The financial problems were the easiest to solve. In 1729, the French government staged a sort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. A friend perceived an opportunity for investors in the structure of the government’s offering, and at a dinner attended by Voltaire he formed a society to purchase shares. Voltaire participated, and in the fall of that year when the returns were posted he had made a fortune. Voltaire’s inheritance from his father also became available to him at the same time, and from this date forward Voltaire never again struggled financially. This result was no insignificant development since Voltaire’s financial independence effectively freed him from one dimension of the patronage system so necessary to aspiring writers and intellectuals in the period. In particular, while other writers were required to appeal to powerful financial patrons in order to secure the livelihood that made possible their intellectual careers, Voltaire was never again beholden to these imperatives.

The patronage structures of Old Regime France provided more than economic support to writers, however, and restoring the crédit upon which his reputation as a writer and thinker depended was far less simple. Gradually, however, through a combination of artfully written plays, poems, and essays and careful self-presentation in Parisian society, Voltaire began to regain his public stature. In the fall of 1732, when the next stage in his career began to unfold, Voltaire was residing at the royal court of Versailles, a sign that his re-establishment in French society was all but complete.

During this rehabilitation, Voltaire also formed a new relationship that was to prove profoundly influential in the subsequent decades. He became reacquainted with Emilie Le Tonnier de Breteuil,the daughter of one of his earliest patrons, who married in 1722 to become the Marquise du Châtelet. Emilie du Châtelet was twenty-nine years old in the spring of 1733 when Voltaire began his relationship with her. She was also a uniquely accomplished woman. Du Châtelet’s father, the Baron de Breteuil, hosted a regular gathering of men of letters that included Voltaire, and his daughter, ten years younger than Voltaire, shared in these associations. Her father also ensured that Emilie received an education that was exceptional for girls at the time. She studied Greek and Latin and trained in mathematics, and when Voltaire reconnected with her in 1733 she was a very knowledgeable thinker in her own right even if her own intellectual career, which would include an original treatise in natural philosophy and a complete French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica —still the only complete French translation ever published—had not yet begun. Her intellectual talents combined with her vivacious personality drew Voltaire to her, and although Du Châtelet was a titled aristocrat married to an important military officer, the couple was able to form a lasting partnership that did not interfere with Du Châtelet’s marriage. This arrangement proved especially beneficial to Voltaire when scandal forced him to flee Paris and to establish himself permanently at the Du Châtelet family estate at Cirey. From 1734, when this arrangement began, to 1749, when Du Châtelet died during childbirth, Cirey was the home to each along with the site of an intense intellectual collaboration. It was during this period that both Voltaire and Du Châtelet became widely known philosophical figures, and the intellectual history of each before 1749 is most accurately described as the history of the couple’s joint intellectual endeavors.

For Voltaire, the events that sent him fleeing to Cirey were also the impetus for much of his work while there. While in England, Voltaire had begun to compose a set of letters framed according to the well-established genre of a traveler reporting to friends back home about foreign lands. Montesquieu’s 1721 Lettres Persanes , which offered a set of fictionalized letters by Persians allegedly traveling in France, and Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels were clear influences when Voltaire conceived his work. But unlike the authors of these overtly fictionalized accounts, Voltaire innovated by adopting a journalistic stance instead, one that offered readers an empirically recognizable account of several aspects of English society. Originally titled Letters on England , Voltaire left a draft of the text with a London publisher before returning home in 1729. Once in France, he began to expand the work, adding to the letters drafted while in England, which focused largely on the different religious sects of England and the English Parliament, several new letters including some on English philosophy. The new text, which included letters on Bacon, Locke, Newton and the details of Newtonian natural philosophy along with an account of the English practice of inoculation for smallpox, also acquired a new title when it was first published in France in 1734: Lettres philosophiques .

Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. His publisher, however, ultimately released the book without these approvals and without Voltaire’s permission. This made the first edition of the Lettres philosophiques illicit, a fact that contributed to the scandal that it triggered, but one that in no way explains the furor the book caused. Historians in fact still scratch their heads when trying to understand why Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques proved to be so controversial. The only thing that is clear is that the work did cause a sensation that subsequently triggered a rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the French authorities. The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman several months after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widely known intellectual outlaw. Had it been executed, a royal lettre de cachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of the Bastille as a result of his authorship of Lettres philosophiques ; instead, he was able to flee with Du Châtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty granted by her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base for Voltaire’s new position as a philosophical rebel and writer in exile.

Had Voltaire been able to avoid the scandal triggered by the Lettres philosophiques , it is highly likely that he would have chosen to do so. Yet once it was thrust upon him, he adopted the identity of the philosophical exile and outlaw writer with conviction, using it to create a new identity for himself, one that was to have far reaching consequences for the history of Western philosophy. At first, Newtonian science served as the vehicle for this transformation. In the decades before 1734, a series of controversies had erupted, especially in France, about the character and legitimacy of Newtonian science, especially the theory of universal gravitation and the physics of gravitational attraction through empty space. Voltaire positioned his Lettres philosophiques as an intervention into these controversies, drafting a famous and widely cited letter that used an opposition between Newton and Descartes to frame a set of fundamental differences between English and French philosophy at the time. He also included other letters about Newtonian science in the work while linking (or so he claimed) the philosophies of Bacon, Locke, and Newton into an English philosophical complex that he championed as a remedy for the perceived errors and illusions perpetuated on the French by René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche. Voltaire did not invent this framework, but he did use it to enflame a set of debates that were then raging, debates that placed him and a small group of young members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris into apparent opposition to the older and more established members of this bastion of official French science. Once installed at Cirey, both Voltaire and Du Châtelet further exploited this apparent division by engaging in a campaign on behalf of Newtonianism, one that continually targeted an imagined monolith called French Academic Cartesianism as the enemy against which they in the name of Newtonianism were fighting.

The centerpiece of this campaign was Voltaire’s Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton , which was first published in 1738 and then again in 1745 in a new and definitive edition that included a new section, first published in 1740, devoted to Newton’s metaphysics. Voltaire offered this book as a clear, accurate, and accessible account of Newton’s philosophy suitable for ignorant Frenchman (a group that he imagined to be large). But he also conceived of it as a machine de guerre directed against the Cartesian establishment, which he believed was holding France back from the modern light of scientific truth. Vociferous criticism of Voltaire and his work quickly erupted, with some critics emphasizing his rebellious and immoral proclivities while others focused on his precise scientific views. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into a singular vision of his enemy as “backward Cartesianism”. As he fought fiercely to defend his positions, an unprecedented culture war erupted in France centered on the character and value of Newtonian natural philosophy. Du Châtelet contributed to this campaign by writing a celebratory review of Voltaire’s Éléments in the Journal des savants , the most authoritative French learned periodical of the day. The couple also added to their scientific credibility by receiving separate honorable mentions in the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire. Voltaire likewise worked tirelessly rebutting critics and advancing his positions in pamphlets and contributions to learned periodicals. By 1745, when the definitive edition of Voltaire’s Éléments was published, the tides of thought were turning his way, and by 1750 the perception had become widespread that France had been converted from backward, erroneous Cartesianism to modern, Enlightened Newtonianism thanks to the heroic intellectual efforts of figures like Voltaire.

This apparent victory in the Newton Wars of the 1730s and 1740s allowed Voltaire’s new philosophical identity to solidify. Especially crucial was the way that it allowed Voltaire’s outlaw status, which he had never fully repudiated, to be rehabilitated in the public mind as a necessary and heroic defense of philosophical truth against the enemies of error and prejudice. From this perspective, Voltaire’s critical stance could be reintegrated into traditional Old Regime society as a new kind of legitimate intellectual martyrdom. Since Voltaire also coupled his explicitly philosophical writings and polemics during the 1730s and 1740s with an equally extensive stream of plays, poems, stories, and narrative histories, many of which were orthogonal in both tone and content to the explicit campaigns of the Newton Wars, Voltaire was further able to reestablish his old identity as an Old Regime man of letters despite the scandals of these years. In 1745, Voltaire was named the Royal Historiographer of France, a title bestowed upon him as a result of his histories of Louis XIV and the Swedish King Charles II. This royal office also triggered the writing of arguably Voltaire’s most widely read and influential book, at least in the eighteenth century, Essais sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1751), a pioneering work of universal history. The position also legitimated him as an officially sanctioned savant. In 1749, after the death of du Châtelet, Voltaire reinforced this impression by accepting an invitation to join the court of the young Frederick the Great in Prussia, a move that further assimilated him into the power structures of Old Regime society.

Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder of Voltaire’s life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophy might not have been so great. Yet during the 1750s, a set of new developments pulled Voltaire back toward his more radical and controversial identity and allowed him to rekindle the critical philosophe persona that he had innovated during the Newton Wars. The first step in this direction involved a dispute with his onetime colleague and ally, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate for Newtonian science in France. When Voltaire was preparing his own Newtonian intervention in the Lettres philosophiques in 1732, he consulted with Maupertuis, who was by this date a pensioner in the French Royal Academy of Sciences. It was largely around Maupertuis that the young cohort of French academic Newtonians gathered during the Newton wars of 1730s and 40s, and with Voltaire fighting his own public campaigns on behalf of this same cause during the same period, the two men became the most visible faces of French Newtonianism even if they never really worked as a team in this effort. Like Voltaire, Maupertuis also shared a relationship with Emilie du Châtelet, one that included mathematical collaborations that far exceeded Voltaire’s capacities. Maupertuis was also an occasional guest at Cirey, and a correspondent with both du Châtelet and Voltaire throughout these years. But in 1745 Maupertuis surprised all of French society by moving to Berlin to accept the directorship of Frederick the Great’s newly reformed Berlin Academy of Sciences.

Maupertuis’s thought at the time of his departure for Prussia was turning toward the metaphysics and rationalist epistemology of Leibniz as a solution to certain questions in natural philosophy. Du Châtelet also shared this tendency, producing in 1740 her Institutions de physiques , a systematic attempt to wed Newtonian mechanics with Leibnizian rationalism and metaphysics. Voltaire found this Leibnizian turn dyspeptic, and he began to craft an anti-Leibnizian discourse in the 1740s that became a bulwark of his brand of Newtonianism. This placed him in opposition to Du Châtelet, even if this intellectual rift in no way soured their relationship. Yet after she died in 1749, and Voltaire joined Maupertuis at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin, this anti-Leibnizianism became the centerpiece of a rift with Maupertuis. Voltaire’s public satire of the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin published in late 1752, which presented Maupertuis as a despotic philosophical buffoon, forced Frederick to make a choice. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to either retract his libelous text or leave Berlin. Voltaire chose the latter, falling once again into the role of scandalous rebel and exile as a result of his writings.

This event proved to be Voltaire’s last official rupture with establishment authority. Rather than returning home to Paris and restoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. When this austere Calvinist enclave proved completely unwelcoming, he took further steps toward independence by using his personal fortune to buy a chateau of his own in the hinterlands between France and Switzerland. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early 1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateau his permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of his intellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment.

During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his most famous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as a member of the “party of humanity” and devoting himself toward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism and superstition. While the singular defense of Newtonian science had focused Voltaire’s polemical energies in the 1730s and 1740s, after 1750 the program became the defense of philosophie tout court and the defeat of its perceived enemies within the ecclesiastical and aristo-monarchical establishment. In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, “ Écrasez l’infâme! ” (“Crush the infamy!”). This entanglement of philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action, a contingent historical outcome of Voltaire’s particular intellectual career, would become his most lasting contribution to the history of philosophy.

The first cause to galvanize this new program was Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie . The first volume of this compendium of definitions appeared in 1751, and almost instantly the work became buried in the kind of scandal to which Voltaire had grown accustomed. Voltaire saw in the controversy a new call to action, and he joined forces with the project soon after its appearance, penning numerous articles that began to appear with volume 5 in 1755. Scandal continued to chase the Encyclopédie , however, and in 1759 the work’s publication privilege was revoked in France, an act that did not kill the project but forced it into illicit production in Switzerland. During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside the project’s editors to defend the work, fusing the Encyclopédie ’s enemies, particularly the Parisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical the Journal de Trevoux , into a monolithic “infamy” devoted to eradicating truth and light from the world. This framing was recapitulated by the opponents of the Encyclopédie , who began to speak of the loose assemblage of authors who contributed articles to the work as a subversive coterie of philosophes devoted to undermining legitimate social and moral order.

As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence, Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. He formed particularly close ties with d’Alembert, and with him began to generalize a broad program for Enlightenment centered on rallying the newly self-conscious philosophes (a term often used synonymously with the Encyclopédistes ) toward political and intellectual change. In this program, the philosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy but through a commitment to the program of defending philosophie itself against its perceived enemies. They were also imagined as activists fighting to eradicate error and superstition from the world. The ongoing defense of the Encyclopédie was one rallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuits—the great enemies of Enlightenment, the philosophes proclaimed—became a second unifying cause. This effort achieved victory in 1763, and soon the philosophes were attempting to infiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge in France. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when the Encyclopédiste and friend of Voltaire and the philosophes , Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was named Controller-General of France, the most powerful ministerial position in the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. Voltaire and his allies had paved the way for this victory through a barrage of writings throughout the 1760s and 1770s that presented philosophie like that espoused by Turgot as an agent of enlightened reform and its critics as prejudicial defenders of an ossified tradition.

Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in support this campaign, his Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764–1770. This book republished his articles from the original Encyclopédie while adding new entries conceived in the spirit of the original work. Yet to fully understand the brand of philosophie that Voltaire made foundational to the Enlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulated in fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other less obviously philosophical genres. Voltaire’s most widely known text, for instance, Candide, ou l’Optimisme , first published in 1759, is a fictional story of a wandering traveler engaged in a set of farcical adventures. Yet contained in the text is a serious attack on Leibnizian philosophy, one that in many ways marks the culmination of Voltaire’s decades long attack on this philosophy started during the Newton wars. Philosophie à la Voltaire also came in the form of political activism, such as his public defense of Jean Calas who, Voltaire argued, was a victim of a despotic state and an irrational and brutal judicial system. Voltaire often attached philosophical reflection to this political advocacy, such as when he facilitated a French translation of Cesare Beccaria’s treatise on humanitarian justice and penal reform and then prefaced the work with his own essay on justice and religious toleration (Calas was a French protestant persecuted by a Catholic monarchy). Public philosophic campaigns such as these that channeled critical reason in a direct, oppositionalist way against the perceived injustices and absurdities of Old Regime life were the hallmark of philosophie as Voltaire understood the term.

Voltaire lived long enough to see some of his long-term legacies start to concretize. With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774 and the appointment of Turgot as Controller-General, the French establishment began to embrace the philosophes and their agenda in a new way. Critics of Voltaire and his program for philosophie remained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as the necessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenment philosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, and courageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltaire bequeathed to later generations. During Voltaire’s lifetime, this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early 1778. Here, as a frail and sickly octogenarian, Voltaire was welcomed by the city as the hero of the Enlightenment that he now personified. A statue was commissioned as a permanent shrine to his legacy, and a public performance of his play Irène was performed in a way that allowed its author to be celebrated as a national hero. Voltaire died several weeks after these events, but the canonization that they initiated has continued right up until the present.

Western philosophy was profoundly shaped by the conception of the philosophe and the program for Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify. The model he offered of the philosophe as critical public citizen and advocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinker only when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in the subsequent development of the European philosophy. Also influential was the example he offered of the philosopher measuring the value of any philosophy according by its ability to effect social change. In this respect, Karl Marx’s famous thesis that philosophy should aspire to change the world, not merely interpret it, owes more than a little debt Voltaire. The link between Voltaire and Marx was also established through the French revolutionary tradition, which similarly adopted Voltaire as one of its founding heroes. Voltaire was the first person to be honored with re-burial in the newly created Pantheon of the Great Men of France that the new revolutionary government created in 1791. This act served as a tribute to the connections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaire’s philosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization as a whole. In a similar way, Voltaire remains today an iconic hero for everyone who sees a positive linkage between critical reason and political resistance in projects of progressive, modernizing reform.

2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy

Voltaire’s philosophical legacy ultimately resides as much in how he practiced philosophy, and in the ends toward which he directed his philosophical activity, as in any specific doctrine or original idea. Yet the particular philosophical positions he took, and the way that he used his wider philosophical campaigns to champion certain understandings while disparaging others, did create a constellation appropriately called Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. True to Voltaire’s character, this constellation is best described as a set of intellectual stances and orientations rather than as a set of doctrines or systematically defended positions. Nevertheless, others found in Voltaire both a model of the well-oriented philosophe and a set of particular philosophical positions appropriate to this stance. Each side of this equation played a key role in defining the Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify.

Central to this complex is Voltaire’s conception of liberty. Around this category, Voltaire’s social activism and his relatively rare excursions into systematic philosophy also converged. In 1734, in the wake of the scandals triggered by the Lettres philosophiques , Voltaire wrote, but left unfinished at Cirey, a Traité de metaphysique that explored the question of human freedom in philosophical terms. The question was particularly central to European philosophical discussions at the time, and Voltaire’s work explicitly referenced thinkers like Hobbes and Leibniz while wrestling with the questions of materialism, determinism, and providential purpose that were then central to the writings of the so-called deists, figures such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. The great debate between Samuel Clarke and Leibniz over the principles of Newtonian natural philosophy was also influential as Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of human existence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principles and impersonal laws.

Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians. For Voltaire, humans are not deterministic machines of matter and motion, and free will thus exists. But humans are also natural beings governed by inexorable natural laws, and his ethics anchored right action in a self that possessed the natural light of reason immanently. This stance distanced him from more radical deists like Toland, and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitist understanding of the role of religion in society. For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order. This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas.

In the Lettres philosophiques , Voltaire had suggested a more radical position with respect to human determinism, especially in his letter on Locke, which emphasized the materialist reading of the Lockean soul that was then a popular figure in radical philosophical discourse. Some readers singled out this part of the book as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein the very materialist account of “ Âme ,” or the soul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie , was also a flashpoint of controversy. Voltaire also defined his own understanding of the soul in similar terms in his own Dictionnaire philosophique . What these examples point to is Voltaire’s willingness, even eagerness, to publicly defend controversial views even when his own, more private and more considered writings often complicated the understanding that his more public and polemical writings insisted upon. In these cases, one often sees Voltaire defending less a carefully reasoned position on a complex philosophical problem than adopting a political position designed to assert his conviction that liberty of speech, no matter what the topic, is sacred and cannot be violated.

Voltaire never actually said “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet the myth that associates this dictum with his name remains very powerful, and one still hears his legacy invoked through the redeclaration of this pronouncement that he never actually declared. Part of the deep cultural tie that joins Voltaire to this dictum is the fact that even while he did not write these precise words, they do capture, however imprecisely, the spirit of his philosophy of liberty. In his voluminous correspondence especially, and in the details of many of his more polemical public texts, one does find Voltaire articulating a view of intellectual and civil liberty that makes him an unquestioned forerunner of modern civil libertarianism. He never authored any single philosophical treatise on this topic, however, yet the memory of his life and philosophical campaigns was influential in advancing these ideas nevertheless. Voltaire’s influence is palpably present, for example, in Kant’s famous argument in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” that Enlightenment stems from the free and public use of critical reason, and from the liberty that allows such critical debate to proceed untrammeled. The absence of a singular text that anchors this linkage in Voltaire’s collected works in no way removes the unmistakable presence of Voltaire’s influence upon Kant’s formulation.

Voltaire’s notion of liberty also anchored his hedonistic morality, another key feature of Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. One vehicle for this philosophy was Voltaire’s salacious poetry, a genre that both reflected in its eroticism and sexual innuendo the lived culture of libertinism that was an important feature of Voltaire’s biography. But Voltaire also contributed to philosophical libertinism and hedonism through his celebration of moral freedom through sexual liberty. Voltaire’s avowed hedonism became a central feature of his wider philosophical identity since his libertine writings and conduct were always invoked by those who wanted to indict him for being a reckless subversive devoted to undermining legitimate social order. Voltaire’s refusal to defer to such charges, and his vigor in opposing them through a defense of the very libertinism that was used against him, also injected a positive philosophical program into these public struggles that was very influential. In particular, through his cultivation of a happily libertine persona, and his application of philosophical reason toward the moral defense of this identity, often through the widely accessible vehicles of poetry and witty prose, Voltaire became a leading force in the wider Enlightenment articulation of a morality grounded in the positive valuation of personal, and especially bodily, pleasure, and an ethics rooted in a hedonistic calculus of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. He also advanced this cause by sustaining an unending attack upon the repressive and, to his mind, anti-human demands of traditional Christian asceticism, especially priestly celibacy, and the moral codes of sexual restraint and bodily self-abnegation that were still central to the traditional moral teachings of the day.

This same hedonistic ethics was also crucial to the development of liberal political economy during the Enlightenment, and Voltaire applied his own libertinism toward this project as well. In the wake of the scandals triggered by Mandeville’s famous argument in The Fable of the Bees (a poem, it should be remembered) that the pursuit of private vice, namely greed, leads to public benefits, namely economic prosperity, a French debate about the value of luxury as a moral good erupted that drew Voltaire’s pen. In the 1730s, he drafted a poem called Le Mondain that celebrated hedonistic worldly living as a positive force for society, and not as the corrupting element that traditional Christian morality held it to be. In his Essay sur les moeurs he also joined with other Enlightenment historians in celebrating the role of material acquisition and commerce in advancing the progress of civilization. Adam Smith would famously make similar arguments in his founding tract of Enlightenment liberalism, On the Wealth of Nations , published in 1776. Voltaire was certainly no great contributor to the political economic science that Smith practiced, but he did contribute to the wider philosophical campaigns that made the concepts of liberty and hedonistic morality central to their work both widely known and more generally accepted.

The ineradicable good of personal and philosophical liberty is arguably the master theme in Voltaire’s philosophy, and if it is, then two other themes are closely related to it. One is the importance of skepticism, and the second is the importance of empirical science as a solvent to dogmatism and the pernicious authority it engenders.

Voltaire’s skepticism descended directly from the neo-Pyrrhonian revival of the Renaissance, and owes a debt in particular to Montaigne, whose essays wedded the stance of doubt with the positive construction of a self grounded in philosophical skepticism. Pierre Bayle’s skepticism was equally influential, and what Voltaire shared with these forerunners, and what separated him from other strands of skepticism, such as the one manifest in Descartes, is the insistence upon the value of the skeptical position in its own right as a final and complete philosophical stance. Among the philosophical tendencies that Voltaire most deplored, in fact, were those that he associated most powerfully with Descartes who, he believed, began in skepticism but then left it behind in the name of some positive philosophical project designed to eradicate or resolve it. Such urges usually led to the production of what Voltaire liked to call “philosophical romances,” which is to say systematic accounts that overcome doubt by appealing to the imagination and its need for coherent explanations. Such explanations, Voltaire argued, are fictions, not philosophy, and the philosopher needs to recognize that very often the most philosophical explanation of all is to offer no explanation at all.

Such skepticism often acted as bulwark for Voltaire’s defense of liberty since he argued that no authority, no matter how sacred, should be immune to challenge by critical reason. Voltaire’s views on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, and based on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to call Voltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one accepts a broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. But even if his personal religious views were subtle, Voltaire was unwavering in his hostility to church authority and the power of the clergy. For similar reasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward the sacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocratic society based their authority. In these cases, Voltaire’s skepticism was harnessed to his libertarian convictions through his continual effort to use critical reason as a solvent for these “superstitions” and the authority they anchored. The philosophical authority of romanciers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz was similarly subjected to the same critique, and here one sees how the defense of skepticism and liberty, more than any deeply held opposition to religiosity per se, was often the most powerful motivator for Voltaire.

From this perspective, Voltaire might fruitfully be compared with Socrates, another founding figure in Western philosophy who made a refusal to declaim systematic philosophical positions a central feature of his philosophical identity. Socrates’s repeated assertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaire’s insistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to know and then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Voltaire was also, like Socrates, a public critic and controversialist who defined philosophy primarily in terms of its power to liberate individuals from domination at the hands of authoritarian dogmatism and irrational prejudice. Yet while Socrates championed rigorous philosophical dialectic as the agent of this emancipation, Voltaire saw this same dialectical rationalism at the heart of the dogmatism that he sought to overcome. Voltaire often used satire, mockery and wit to undermine the alleged rigor of philosophical dialectic, and while Socrates saw this kind of rhetorical word play as the very essence of the erroneous sophism that he sought to alleviate, Voltaire cultivated linguistic cleverness as a solvent to the false and deceptive dialectic that anchored traditional philosophy.

Against the acceptance of ignorance that rigorous skepticism often demanded, and against the false escape from it found in sophistical knowledge—or what Voltaire called imaginative philosophical romances—Voltaire offered a different solution than the rigorous dialectical reasoning of Socrates: namely, the power and value of careful empirical science. Here one sees the debt that Voltaire owed to the currents of Newtonianism that played such a strong role in launching his career. Voltaire’s own critical discourse against imaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with English and Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots, who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles with Leibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations of Newtonian natural philosophy. In his Principia Mathematica (1687; 2 nd rev. edition 1713), Newton had offered a complete mathematical and empirical description of how celestial and terrestrial bodies behaved. Yet when asked to explain how bodies were able to act in the way that he mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newton famously replied “I feign no hypotheses.” From the perspective of traditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand waving since offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies in motion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences. Newton’s major philosophical innovation rested, however, in challenging this very epistemological foundation, and the assertion and defense of Newton’s position against its many critics, not least by Voltaire, became arguably the central dynamic of philosophical change in the first half of the eighteenth century.

While Newtonian epistemology admitted of many variations, at its core rested a new skepticism about the validity of apriori rationalist accounts of nature and a new assertion of brute empirical fact as a valid philosophical understanding in its own right. European Natural philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century had thrown out the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle with its four part causality and teleological understanding of bodies, motion and the cosmic order. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. This approach lead to the vortical account of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to be swimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects in the manner we observe. What could not be observed, however, was the ethereal sea itself, or the other agents of this supposedly comprehensive mechanical cosmos. Yet rationality nevertheless dictated that such mechanisms must exist since without them philosophy would be returned to the occult causes of the Aristotelian natural tendencies and teleological principles. Figuring out what these point-contact mechanisms were and how they worked was, therefore, the charge of the new mechanical natural philosophy of the late seventeenth century. Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established their scientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal.

Newton pointed natural philosophy in a new direction. He offered mathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as the new foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. From this perspective, the great error of both Aristotelian and the new mechanical natural philosophy was its failure to adhere strictly enough to empirical facts. Vortical mechanics, for example, claimed that matter was moved by the action of an invisible agent, yet this, the Newtonians began to argue, was not to explain what is really happening but to imagine a fiction that gives us a speciously satisfactory rational explanation of it. Natural philosophy needs to resist the allure of such rational imaginings and to instead deal only with the empirically provable. Moreover, the Newtonians argued, if a set of irrefutable facts cannot be explained other then by accepting the brute facticity of their truth, this is not a failure of philosophical explanation so much as a devotion to appropriate rigor. Such epistemological battles became especially intense around Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Few questioned that Newton had demonstrated an irrefutable mathematical law whereby bodies appear to attract one another in relation to their masses and in inverse relation to the square of the distance between them. But was this rigorous mathematical and empirical description a philosophical account of bodies in motion? Critics such as Leibniz said no, since mathematical description was not the same thing as philosophical explanation, and Newton refused to offer an explanation of how and why gravity operated the way that it did. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. They further insisted that it was enough that gravity did operate the way that Newton said it did, and that this was its own justification for accepting his theory. They further mocked those who insisted on dreaming up chimeras like the celestial vortices as explanations for phenomena when no empirical evidence existed to support of such theories.

The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonian position in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades of the eighteenth century. It also describes Voltaire’s own stance in these same battles. His contribution, therefore, was not centered on any innovation within these very familiar Newtonian themes; rather, it was his accomplishment to become a leading evangelist for this new Newtonian epistemology, and by consequence a major reason for its widespread dissemination and acceptance in France and throughout Europe. A comparison with David Hume’s role in this same development might help to illuminate the distinct contributions of each. Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism about rationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion that made empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy. Yet Hume’s target remained traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point of denying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. This argument would famously awake Kant’s dogmatic slumbers and lead to the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, but Voltaire had different fish to fry. His attachment was to the new Newtonian empirical scientists, and while he was never more than a dilettante scientist himself, his devotion to this form of natural inquiry made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocate and ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception of philosophy that Newton initiated.

For Voltaire (and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians) the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy. This involved sharing in Hume’s critique of abstract rationalist systems, but it also involved the very different project of defending empirical induction and experimental reasoning as the new epistemology appropriate for a modern Enlightened philosophy. In particular, Voltaire fought vigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used to challenge Newtonian reasoning. His famous conclusion in Candide , for example, that optimism was a philosophical chimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from brute empirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions. His alternative offered in the same text of a life devoted to simple tasks with clear, tangible, and most importantly useful ends was also derived from the utilitarian discourse that Newtonians also used to justify their science. Voltaire’s campaign on behalf of smallpox inoculation, which began with his letter on the topic in the Lettres philosophiques , was similarly grounded in an appeal to the facts of the case as an antidote to the fears generated by logical deductions from seemingly sound axiomatic principles. All of Voltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact as the ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence to preexisting understandings. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism.

Voltaire also contributed directly to the new relationship between science and philosophy that the Newtonian revolution made central to Enlightenment modernity. Especially important was his critique of metaphysics and his argument that it be eliminated from any well-ordered science. At the center of the Newtonian innovations in natural philosophy was the argument that questions of body per se were either irrelevant to, or distracting from, a well focused natural science. Against Leibniz, for example, who insisted that all physics begin with an accurate and comprehensive conception of the nature of bodies as such, Newton argued that the character of bodies was irrelevant to physics since this science should restrict itself to a quantified description of empirical effects only and resist the urge to speculate about that which cannot be seen or measured. This removal of metaphysics from physics was central to the overall Newtonian stance toward science, but no one fought more vigorously for it, or did more to clarify the distinction and give it a public audience than Voltaire.

The battles with Leibnizianism in the 1740s were the great theater for Voltaire’s work in this regard. In 1740, responding to Du Châtelet’s efforts in her Institutions de physiques to reconnect metaphysics and physics through a synthesis of Leibniz with Newton, Voltaire made his opposition to such a project explicit in reviews and other essays he published. He did the same during the brief revival of the so-called “vis viva controversy” triggered by du Châtelet’s treatise, defending the empirical and mechanical conception of body and force against those who defended Leibniz’s more metaphysical conception of the same thing. In the same period, Voltaire also composed a short book entitled La Metaphysique de Newton , publishing it in 1740 as an implicit counterpoint to Châtelet’s Institutions . This tract did not so much articulate Newton’s metaphysics as celebrate the fact that he avoided practicing such speculations altogether. It also accused Leibniz of becoming deluded by his zeal to make metaphysics the foundation of physics. In the definitive 1745 edition of his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton , Voltaire also appended his tract on Newton’s metaphysics as the book’s introduction, thus framing his own understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and empirical science in direct opposition to Châtelet’s Leibnizian understanding of the same. He also added personal invective and satire to this same position in his indictment of Maupertuis in the 1750s, linking Maupertuis’s turn toward metaphysical approaches to physics in the 1740s with his increasingly deluded philosophical understanding and his authoritarian manner of dealing with his colleagues and critics.

While Voltaire’s attacks on Maupertuis crossed the line into ad hominem , at their core was a fierce defense of the way that metaphysical reasoning both occludes and deludes the work of the physical scientist. Moreover, to the extent that eighteenth-century Newtonianism provoked two major trends in later philosophy, first the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy à la Kant through his “Copernican Revolution” that relocated the remains of metaphysics in the a priori categories of reason, and second, the marginalization of metaphysics altogether through the celebration of philosophical positivism and the anti-speculative scientific method that anchored it, Voltaire should be seen as a major progenitor of the latter. By also attaching what many in the nineteenth century saw as Voltaire’s proto-positivism to his celebrated campaigns to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority through the debunking of the “irrational superstitions” that appeared to anchor such authority, Voltaire’s legacy also cemented the alleged linkage that joined positivist science on the one hand with secularizing disenchantment and dechristianization on the other. In this way, Voltaire should be seen as the initiator of a philosophical tradition that runs from him to Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin, and then on to Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins in the twentieth century.

Because of Voltaire’s celebrity, efforts to collect and canonize his writings began immediately after his death, and still continue today. The result has been the production of three major collections of his writings including his vast correspondence, the last unfinished. Together these constitute the authoritative corpus of Voltaire’s written work.

• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire , edited by A. Beuchot. 72 vols. Paris: Lefevre, 1829–1840.
• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire , edited by L.E.D. Moland and G. Bengesco. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1885.
• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire , edited by Theodore Besterman. 135 vols. (projected) Geneva, Banbury, and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–.

Collections of Writings

• The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version , William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), 21 vols., New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty ]
• The Portable Voltaire , Ben Ray Redman (ed.), New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Selected Works of Voltaire , Joseph McCabe (ed.), London: Watts, 2007.
• Shorter Writings of Voltaire , J.I. Rodale (ed.), New York: A.S. Barnes, 1960.
• Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of his Correspondence , S.G. Tallentyre (tr.), Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2004.
• Voltaire on Religion: Selected Writings , Kenneth W. Applegate (ed.), New York: F. Ungar, 1974.
• Voltaire: Selected Writings , Christopher Thacker (ed.), London: Dent, 1995.
• Voltaire: Selections , Paul Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan, 1989.
• Translations of Voltaire’s major plays are found in: The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version , William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty ]
• Seven Plays (Mérope (1737), Olympia (1761), Alzire (1734), Orestes (1749), Oedipus (1718), Zaire, Caesar) , William Fleming (tr.), New York: Howard Fertig, 1988.
• The Age of Louis XIV (1733) and other Selected Writings , J.H. Brumfitt (ed.), New York: Twayne, 1963.
• The Age of Louis XIV (1733) , Martyn P. Pollack (tr.), London and New York: Dutton, 1978.
• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727) , Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727) , Antonia White and Ragnhild Marie Hatton (eds.), New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.
• The Philosophy of History (1764) , New York: The Philosophical Library, 1965.

Essays, Letters, and Stories

• Vol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760).
• Vol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors (1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An Indian Adventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).
• Vol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The World as it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin (1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772), Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).
• The English Essays of 1727 , David Williams and Richard Walker (eds.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996.
• Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia (1738) , Glasgow, 1967.
• The History of the Travels of Scarmentado (1756) , Glasgow: The College Press, 1969.
• Micromégas and other Short Fictions (1738), Theo Cuffe and Haydn Mason (eds.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
• The Princess of Babylon (1768) , London: Signet Books, 1969.
• The Virgin of Orleans, or Joan of Arc (1755) , Howard Nelson (tr.), Denver: A. Swallow, 1965.
• Voltaire. Essay on Milton (1727) , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
• Voltaire’s Romances , New York: P. Eckler, 1986.
• Zadig, or L’Ingénu (1757), London: Penguin Books, 1984.
• Zadig, or the Book of Fate (1757) , New York: Garland, 1974.
• Zadig, or The Book of Fate an Oriental History (1757) , Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982.
• The Calas Affair: A Treatise on Tolerance (1762) , Brian Masters (ed.), London: The Folio Society, 1994.
• The Sermon of the Fifty (1759) , J.A.R. Séguin (ed.), Jersey City, NJ: R. Paxton, 1963.
• A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays , Joseph McCabe (ed.), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.
• A Treatise on Tolerance and other Writings , edited by Brian Masters, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994
• Voltaire. Political Writings , edited by David Williams, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994

Editions of Major Individual Works

• Translated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.
• Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.
• Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
• Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.
• Philosophical Dictionary: A Compendium , Wade Baskin (ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
• Philosophical Dictionary: Selections , Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1965.
• John Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.
• Leonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
• Ernest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.
• Nicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• F.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.
• Harvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [ Available online from Bartleby.com ]
• Voltaire’s Letters on the Quakers (1727) , Philadelphia: William H. Allen, 1953.
• C.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.
• Candide and other Writings , Haskell M. Block (ed.), New York: Modern Library, 1985.
• Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York: Modern Library, 1992.
• Shane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.
• Candide: A Dual Language Book , New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.
• Robert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
• Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available online at Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project ]
• Daniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
• Candide and Related Texts , David Wooton (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.
• Lowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.
• Candide & Zadig , Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket Books, 2005.
• Raffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
• Theo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
• Candide and other Stories , Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories , Donald Frame (tr. and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.

The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger every day. The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted to scholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed. The Voltaire Foundation’s series Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century changed its name in 2013 to Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment . The original series published over 450 volumes, many related to Voltaire, and while the new title reflects a change toward a broader publishing agenda, it remains, along with Cahier Voltaire published by La Fondation Voltaire à Ferney, the best periodical source for new scholarship on Voltaire.

• Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 1975, Voltaire and the Century of Light , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Badinter, Elizabeth, 1983, Émilie, Émilie, l’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: Flammarion.
• –––, 1999–2002, Les Passions intellectuelles , 2 volumes, Paris: Fayard.
• Barber, W.H., 1955, Leibniz in France from Arnauld to Voltaire: A Study in French Reactions to Leibnizianism 1670–1760 , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Barrell, Rex A., 1988, Bolingbroke and France , Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
• Besterman, Theodore, 1969, Voltaire , New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.
• Bird, Stephen, 2000, Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-century France , Oxford: Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment.
• Brooks, Richard A., 1964, Voltaire and Leibniz , Geneva: Droz.
• Brown, Harcourt, 1947, Voltaire and the Royal Society of London , Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly.
• Brumfitt, J.H., 1970, Voltaire: historian , London: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1973, The French Enlightenment , Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co.
• Brunel, Lucien, 1967, Les Philosophes et l’académie française au dix-huitième siècle , Genève: Slatkine Reprints.
• Brunet, Pierre, 1931, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: A. Blanchard.
• Collins, J. Churton, 1908, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England , London: E. Nash.
• Conlon, Pierre M., 1961, Voltaire’s literary career from 1728 to 1750 , Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.
• Cottret, Bernard, 1992, Bolingbroke: exil et écriture au siècle des Lumières , Paris: Klincksieck.
• Cronk, Nicolas, 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2014, Voltaire: a very short introduction , Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation.
• Darnton, Robert, 1979, The Business of Enlightenment: The Publishing History of the Encyclopédie , 1775–1800, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1982, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Dickinson, H.T., 1970, Bolingbroke , London: Constable.
• Dieckmann, Herbert, 1943, Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretations , (Washington University Studies, New Series, Language and Literature, no. 18), St. Louis: Washington University Press.
• Duchet, Michèle, 1971, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot , Paris: F. Maspero.
• Ehrman, Esther, 1986, Mme. du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment , Leamington [Spa]: Berg.
• Gandt, François de, 2001, Cirey dans la vie intellectuelle: la réception de Newton en France , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Gardiner Janik, Linda, 1982, “Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Mme. Du Châtelet’s Institutions de physiques , 1737–1740”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , 201: 85–113.
• Gay, Peter, 1954, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment , New York: Knopf.
• Gay, Peter, 1969, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 1: The Science of Freedom ), New York: Knopf.
• –––, 1977, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 2: The Rise of Modern Paganism ), New York: Knopf 1977.
• –––, 1988, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Guerlac, Henry, 1981, Newton on the Continent , Ithaca.
• Gurrado, Antonio, 2013, Voltaire cattolico , Torino: Lindau.
• Hagengruber, Ruth (ed.), 2011, Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton , Dordrecht: Springer.
• Ḥadīd, Javādī, 2012, Voltaire et l’Islam , Ozoir la Ferriere : Albouraq.
• Hellman, Lilian, 1980, Dorothy Parker, John La Touche, Richard Wilbur, and Leonard Bernstein, 1956–1957, Candide, An Operetta in Two Acts , New York: Jaini Publications.
• Hutchison, Ross, 1991, Locke in France: 1688–1734 , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Iltis, Carolyn, 1977, “Madame du Châtelet’s metaphysics and mechanics”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science , 8: 29–48.
• Israel, Jonathan, 2000, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2009, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2014, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Jacob, Margaret, 1981, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans , London: Cornerstone Book Publishers.
• Kramnick, Isaac, 1968, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Lanson, Gustave, 1894, Histoire de la littérature française , Paris: Hachette.
• Lanson, Gustave, 1906, Voltaire , Paris: Hachette.
• Libby, Margaret Sherwood, 1935, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences , New York: Columbia University Press, 1935.
• Lilti, Antoine, 2005, Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: Fayard.
• Mason, Haydn Trevor, 1963, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire , London: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1975, Voltaire , New York: St. Martin’s.
• Masseau, Didier, 1994, L’Invention de l’intellectual dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Mattei, Silvia, 2010, Voltaire et les voyages de la raison , Paris: Harmattan.
• Maurois, André, 1935, Voltaire , Paris: Gallimard.
• Mauzi, Robert, 1960, L’idée du bonheur dans la litterature et la pensée francaises au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: A. Colin.
• McKenna, Antony, 1994, Écraser l’infame, 1759–1770 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 4), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• McMahon, Darrin M., 2001, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-enlightenment and the Making of Modernity , New York: Oxford University Press.
• McNutt, Jennifer Powell, 2013, Calvin meets Voltaire: the clergy of Geneva in the age of enlightenment, 1685–1798 , Burlington: Ashgate.
• Melton, James Van Horn, 2001, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Méricam-Bourdet, Myrtille, 2012, Voltaire et l’écriture de l’histoire: un enjeu politique , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Mervaud, Christiane, 1991, De la cour au jardin, 1750–1759 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 3), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Mitchell, Harvey, 2104, Voltaire’s Jews and modern Jewish identity: rethinking the Enlightenment , London: Routledge.
• Morize, André, 1909, L’Apologie du luxe au XVIIIe Siècle: “Le Mondain” et ses Sources , Paris: H. Didier.
• Neiertz, Patrick, 2012, Voltaire et l’économie politique , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Northeast, Catherine M., 1991, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762 , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Orieux, Jean, 1966, Voltaire, ou la Royauté de l’esprit , Paris: Flammarion.
• Palmer, Robert R., 1939, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18 th Century France , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Pappas, John N., 1957, Berthier’s Journal de Trevoux and the Philosophes (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Volume 3), Geneva: Institut and Musée Voltaire.
• –––, 1962, Voltaire and d’Alembert , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Pearson, Roger, 1993, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s “Contes philosophiques” , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2005, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom , London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Perry, Norma, 1975, Sir Everard Fawkener, friend and correspondent of Voltaire , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Pettit, Alexander, 1997, Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Responses to Walpole, 1730–1737 , Newark: University of Delaware Press.
• Pomeau, René, 1969, La réligion de Voltaire , Paris: Nizet.
• –––, 1985, D’Arouet à Voltaire, 1694–1734 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 1), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• –––, 1994, On a voulu l’enterrer, 1770–1791 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 5), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Pomeau, René (ed)., 1985–1994, Voltaire en son temps , 5 vols., Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Popkin, Richard Henry, 1979, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Proust, Jacques, 1962, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie , Paris: Slatkine.
• Rasmussen, Dennis Carl, 2014, The pragmatic enlightenment: recovering the liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rousseau, André Michel, 1976, L’Angleterre et Voltaire (1718–1789) , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Saigey, Émile, 1873, Les sciences au XVIIIe siècle: la physique de Voltaire , Paris: G. Baillière.
• Schlereth, Thomas J., 1977, The cosmopolitan ideal in Enlightenment thought, its form and function in the ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 , South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Shank, J.B., 2008, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Sharpe, Matthew, 2015, “On a Neglected Argument in French Philosophy: Sceptical Humanism in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus”, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory , 16(1): 1–26.
• Spink, John Stephenson, 1960, French Free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire , London: University of London, Athlone Press.
• Terrall, Mary, 2002, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Tlili, Mahbouba Saï, 2009, Voltaire et l’Islam Tunis: Arabesques.
• Torrey, Norman L., 1930, Voltaire and the English Deists , New Haven: Yale University Press, 2 nd edition, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967.
• –––,1938, The Spirit of Voltaire , New York: Russell and Russell, 2 nd edition, 1968.
• Undank, Jack, 1989, “Portrait of the Philosopher as Tramp”, in A New History of French Literature , Dennis Hollier (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 421–428.
• Vaillot, René, 1988, Avec madame Du Châtelet, 1734–1749 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 2), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Van Kley, Dale, 1975, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France, 1757–1767 , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Vercruysse, Jeroom, 1966, Voltaire et la Holland, Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.
• Vernière, Paul, 1954, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Wade, Ira Owen, 1938, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1941, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1947, Studies on Voltaire with Some Unpublished Papers of Mme. du Châtelet , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1969, The Intellectual Devevelopment of Voltaire , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Zinsser, Judith, 2006, La Dame d’Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Châtelet , New York: Viking.
• Zinsser, Judith and Hayes, Julie (eds.), 2006, Emilie du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Château de Cirey , (Champagne, France), Residence of Voltaire.
• Institut et Musée Voltaire , Geneva.
• La Société Voltaire .
• The Voltaire Foundation , Oxford University.
• The Best Voltaire Books , recommended by Nicholas Cronk.

Clarke, Samuel | Descartes, René | hedonism | Hume, David: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | liberty: positive and negative | Newton, Isaac | skepticism

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The Life and Work of Voltaire, French Enlightenment Writer

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Born François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778) was a writer and philosopher of the French Enlightenment period . He was an incredibly prolific writer, advocating for civil freedoms and criticizing major institutions such as the Catholic Church.

Fast Facts: Voltaire

• Full Name : François-Marie Arouet
• Occupation : Writer, poet, and philosopher
• Born : November 21, 1694 in Paris, France
• Died : May 30, 1778 in Paris, France
• Parents: François Arouet and Marie Marguerite Daumard
• Key Accomplishments : Voltaire published significant criticism of the French monarchy. His commentary on religious tolerance, historiographies, and civil liberties became a key component of Enlightenment thinking.

Voltaire was the fifth child and fourth son of François Arouet and his wife Marie Marguerite Daumard. The Arouet family had already lost two sons, Armand-François and Robert, in infancy, and Voltaire (then François-Marie) was nine years younger than his surviving brother, Armand, and seven years younger than his sole sister, Marguerite-Catherine. François Arouet was a lawyer and a treasury official; their family was part of the French nobility , but at the lowest possible rank. Later in life, Voltaire claimed to be the illegitimate son of a higher-ranked nobleman by the name of Guérin de Rochebrune.

His early education came from the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. From the age of ten until seventeen, Voltaire received classical instruction in Latin, rhetoric , and theology. Once he left school, he decided he wanted to become a writer, much to the dismay of his father, who wanted Voltaire to follow him into the law. Voltaire also continued learning outside the confines of formal education. He developed his writing talents and also became multilingual, attaining fluency in English, Italian, and Spanish in addition to his native French.

First Career and Early Romance

After leaving school, Voltaire moved to Paris. He pretended to be working as an assistant to a notary, theoretically as a stepping stone into the legal profession. In reality, though, he was actually spending most of his time writing poetry. After a time, his father found out the truth and sent him away from Paris to study law in Caen, Normandy.

Even this did not deter Voltaire from continuing to write. He merely switched over from poetry to writing studies on history and essays. During this period, the witty style of writing and speaking that made Voltaire so popular first appeared in his work, and it endeared him to many of the higher-ranking nobles he spent time around.

In 1713, with his father’s assistance, Voltaire began working at the Hague in the Netherlands as a secretary to the French ambassador, the marquis de Châteauneuf. While there, Voltaire had his earliest known romantic entanglement, falling in love with a Huguenot refugee, Catherine Olympe Dunoyer. Unfortunately, their connection was considered unsuitable and caused something of a scandal, so the marquis forced Voltaire to break it off and return to France. By this point, his political and legal career had all but been given up.

Playwright and Government Critic

Upon returning to Paris, Voltaire launched his writing career. Since his favorite topics were critiques of the government and satires of political figures, he landed in hot water pretty quickly. One early satire, which accused the Duke of Orleans of incest, even landed him in prison in the Bastille for nearly a year. Upon his release, however, his debut play (a take on the Oedipus myth ) was produced, and it was a critical and commercial success. The Duke whom he had previously offended even presented him with a medal in recognition of the achievement.

It was around this time that François-Marie Arouet began going by the pseudonym Voltaire, under which he would publish most of his works. To this day, there’s much debate as to how he came up with the name. It may have its roots as an anagram or pun on his family name or several different nicknames. Voltaire reportedly adopted the name in 1718, after being released from the Bastille. After his release, he also struck up a new romance with a young widow, Marie-Marguerite de Rupelmonde.

Unfortunately, Voltaire’s next works did not have nearly the same success as his first. His play Artémire flopped so badly that even the text itself only survives in a few fragments, and when he tried to publish an epic poem about King Henry IV (the first Bourbon dynasty monarch), he couldn’t find a publisher in France. Instead, he and Rupelmonde journeyed to the Netherlands, where he secured a publisher in The Hague. Eventually, Voltaire convinced a French publisher to publish the poem, La Henriade , secretly. The poem was a success, as was his next play, which was performed at the wedding of Louis XV.

In 1726, Voltaire became involved in a quarrel with a young nobleman who reportedly insulted Voltaire’s change of name. Voltaire challenged him to a duel, but the nobleman instead had Voltaire beaten, then arrested without a trial. He was, however, able to negotiate with authorities to be exiled to England rather than imprisoned at the Bastille again.

English Exile

As it turns out, Voltaire’s exile to England would change his entire outlook. He moved in the same circles as some of the leading figures of English society, thought, and culture, including Jonathan Swift , Alexander Pope, and more. In particular, he became fascinated by the government of England in comparison with France: England was a constitutional monarchy , whereas France still lived under an absolute monarchy . The country also had greater freedoms of speech and religion, which would become a key component of Voltaire’s criticisms and writings.

Voltaire was able to return to France after a little more than two years, though still banned from the court at Versailles. Thanks to participation in a plan to literally purchase the French lottery, along with an inheritance from his father, he quickly became incredibly rich. In the early 1730s, he began publishing work that showed his clear English influences. His play Zaïre was dedicated to his English friend Everard Fawkener and included praise of English culture and freedoms. He also published a collection of essays that praised British politics, attitudes towards religion and science, and arts and literature, called the  Letters Concerning the English Nation , in 1733 in London. The next year, it was published in French, landing Voltaire in hot water again. Because he did not get the approval of the official royal censor before publishing, and because the essays praised British religious freedom and human rights, the book was banned and Voltaire had to quickly flee from Paris.

In 1733, Voltaire also met the most significant romantic partner of his life: Émilie, the Marquise du Châtelet, a mathematician who was married to the Marquis du Châtelet. Despite being 12 years younger than Voltaire (and married, and a mother), Émilie was very much an intellectual peer to Voltaire. They amassed a shared collection of over 20,000 books and spent time studying and performing experiments together, many of which were inspired by Voltaire’s admiration of Sir Isaac Newton . After the Letters scandal, Voltaire fled to the estate belonging to her husband. Voltaire paid to renovate the building, and her husband did not raise any fuss about the affair, which would continue for 16 years.

Somewhat abashed by his multiple conflicts with the government, Voltaire began keeping a lower profile, although he continued his writing, now focused on history and science. The Marquise du Châtelet contributed considerably alongside him, producing a definitive French translation of Newton’s Principia and writing reviews of Voltaire’s Newton-based work. Together, they were instrumental in introducing Newton’s work in France. They also developed some critical views on religion, with Voltaire publishing several texts that sharply criticized the establishment of state religions, religious intolerance, and even organized religion as a whole. Similarly, he railed against the style of histories and biographies of the past, suggesting they were filled with falsehoods and supernatural explanations and needed a fresh, more scientific and evidence-based approach to research.

Connections in Prussia

Frederick the Great , while he was still just the crown prince of Prussia, began a correspondence with Voltaire around 1736, but they did not meet in person until 1740. Despite their friendship, Voltaire still went to Frederick’s court in 1743 as a French spy to report back on Frederick’s intentions and capabilities with regards to the ongoing War of Austrian Succession.

By the mid-1740s, Voltaire’s romance with the Marquise du Châtelet had begun to wind down. He grew tired of spending nearly all his time at her estate, and both found new companionship. In Voltaire’s case, it was even more scandalous than their affair had been: he was attracted to, and later lived with, his own niece, Marie Louise Mignot. In 1749, the Marquise died in childbirth, and Voltaire moved to Prussia the following year.

During the 1750s, Voltaire’s relationships in Prussia began to deteriorate. He was accused of theft and forgery relating to some bond investments, then had a feud with the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences that ended with Voltaire writing a satire that angered Frederick the Great and resulted in the temporary destruction of their friendship. They would, however, reconcile in the 1760s .

Geneva, Paris, and Final Years

Forbidden by King Louis XV to return to Paris, Voltaire instead arrived in Geneva in 1755. He continued publishing, with major philosophical writings such as Candide, or Optimism , a satire of Leibniz's philosophy of optimistic determinism which would become Voltaire’s most famous work.

Starting in 1762, Voltaire took up the causes of unjustly persecuted people, particularly those who were victims of religious persecution. Among his most notable causes was the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot who was convicted of murdering his son for wanting to convert to Catholicism and tortured to death; his property was confiscated and his daughters forced into Catholic convents. Voltaire, along with others, strongly doubted his guilt and suspected a case of religious persecution. The conviction was overturned in 1765.

Voltaire’s last year was still full of activity. In early 1778, he was initiated into Freemasonry , and historians dispute as to whether he did so at the urging of Benjamin Franklin or not. He also returned to Paris for the first time in a quarter century to see his latest play, Irene , open. He fell ill on the journey and believed himself to be on death’s doorstep, but recovered. Two months later, however, he became ill again and died on May 30, 1778. Accounts of his deathbed vary wildly, depending on the sources and their own opinions of Voltaire. His famous deathbed quote—in which a priest asked him to renounce Satan and he replied “Now is not the time for making new enemies!”—is likely apocryphal and actually traced to a 19 th -century joke that was attributed to Voltaire in the 20 th century.

Voltaire was formally denied a Christian burial because of his criticism of the Church, but his friends and family managed to secretly arrange a burial at the abbey of Scellières in Champagne. He left behind a complicated legacy. For instance, while he argued for religious tolerance, he also was one of the origins of Enlightenment-era anti-Semitism. He endorsed anti-enslavement and anti-monarchical views, but disdained the idea of democracy as well. In the end, Voltaire’s texts became a key component of Enlightenment thinking , which has allowed his philosophy and writing to endure for centuries.

• Pearson, Roger. Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom . Bloomsbury, 2005.
• Pomeau, René Henry. “Voltaire: French Philosopher and Author.” Encyclopaedia Britannica , https://www.britannica.com/biography/Voltaire.
• “Voltaire.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/
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Famous Philosophers

Biography, Facts and Works

François-Marie d’Arouet, famous by his pen name Voltaire, was a prominent philosopher of the Enlightenment movement of the Eighteenth century. Born on November 21 1694, Voltaire gave remarkable concepts of freedom and enlightenment. He was also a noted historian and an outspoken, witty intellectual of his times.

Voltaire was not a philosopher in the strict sense of the term, though he put across new ideas and thoughts prolifically through his varied style of writing. He experimented with almost all forms of writing, including poetry, prose, letters, plays, essays, novels and even scientific works. The count of his letters reaches to 20,000, while books and pamphlets sum up to more than two thousand. Most of his books are works of satire, comprising of content sparking much controversy.

On the subject of morality, he tried to find a middle ground. In his most famous work Candide (1759), he spoke sharply against the overly optimistic philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz . On the other hand, he also wrote in opposition of the pessimistic ideas regarding human evilness by Blaise Pascal. He focused on judging morality based solely on reasoning.

As a philosopher, he published the famous Philosophical Dictionary in 1764, and various other essays under the title of Encyclopedia , compiled between the years 1751-1772. He openly criticized the various sections of the French society, especially religious and political institutions.

Voltaire’s contribution to history cannot be neglected, as he provided a new perspective on how to record the past. Voltaire is considered to be the first person to keep track of historical events fundamentally based on culture. The Age of Louis XIV in 1751 and the Essay on Customs and Spirit of Nations published in 1756 are vital examples of his historiography capabilities.

Voltaire opposed almost all religions, calling the Bible and the Quran outdated manuscripts, deeming them not as divine presents but written by mortals. His harsh criticism of religion and religious scriptures and institutions often makes him come across as an atheist. In reality, however, he was a deist; he was one of the most important advocates of deism in England and France. He did not outright reject the possibility of a supreme being, but believed that an all-knowing and all-governing deity should be found through observation and reasoning, instead of blind faith. In the Treatise on Toleration (1763), he defended the right of religious freedom for all, and said that all humans are people of the same God, thus they should not create divisions and conflicts on the basis of religion.

Voltaire’s political philosophy was highly inspired by the ideas given by Confucius . For him, democracy was a practice of displaying mass foolishness.  He was in favor of a sensible, responsible monarchy as form of government. For Voltaire, the provision of education to the masses would not only be favorable for the people, but also for the monarch. After observing the failure of this theory by Frederick the Great, he came to the conclusion that educating ourselves is a duty which only we can fulfill in its entirety.

He also spoke against the unfair authority of the church and the state which they exercised above the middle class, which comprised of most of the tax-paying population of the country.

Voltaire died on 30 May 1778. France remembers him as a brave polemic who was never afraid to speak his mind, in spite of fierce opposition. His ideas have remained impactful throughout the Enlightenment period and are honored around the world to this day.

• John Searle
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Biography Online

Voltaire Biography

“Love truth, but pardon error.”

– Voltaire

Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing more than 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets. Despite strict censorship laws, he frequently risked large penalties by breaking them and questioning the establishment.

Short Biography of Voltaire

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet, in Paris. He was educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704–1711), becoming fluent in Greek, Latin and the major European languages.

His father tried to encourage Voltaire to become a lawyer, but Voltaire was more interested in becoming a writer. Instead of studying to be a lawyer, he began writing poetry and mild criticisms of the church and state. His humorous, satirical writing made him popular with sections of Paris society, though they also started attracting the attention of the censors.

In 1726, he was exiled to England after being involved in a scuffle with a French nobleman. The nobleman used his wealth to have him arrested, and this would cause Voltaire to try and reform the French judicial system. After this first imprisonment in the Bastilles, he changed his name to Voltaire – signifying his departure from his past. He also used numerous other pen names throughout the course of his life, in a bid to escape censorship.

Voltaire spent three years in England, where he was influenced by British writers, such as William Shakespeare and also the different political system, which saw a constitutional monarchy rather than an absolute monarchy as in France. He also learnt from great scientists, such as Sir Isaac Newton . Voltaire was particularly impressed by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, saying once:

“We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”

Although he had much in common with fellow French Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau , the pair often disagreed and had a prickly relationship. However, after Rousseau wrote Emile / Vicaire Savoyard, Voltaire offered Rousseau a safe haven because he appreciated Rousseau’s attack on religious hypocrisy. Rousseau regretted not replying to Voltaire’s offer.

On returning to France, he wrote letters praising the British system of government and their greater respect for freedom of speech. This enraged the French establishment, and again he was forced to flee Paris.

Seeking a safe place, Voltaire began a collaboration with Marquise du Chatelet. During this time, Voltaire wrote on Newton’s scientific theories and helped to make Newton’s ideas accessible to a much wider section of European society. He also began attacking the church’s relationship with the state. Voltaire argued for the separation of religion and state and also allowing freedom of belief and religious tolerance. Voltaire had a mixed opinion of the Bible and was willing to criticise it. Though not professing a religion, he believed in God, as a matter of reason.

“What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”  On Catholicism

In a letter to Frederick II, King of Prussia, (5 January 1767) he once wrote:

“Ours [religion] is without a doubt the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and the most blood-thirsty ever to infect the world.”

In 1744, Voltaire returned to Paris, where he began a relationship with his niece, Marie Louise Mignot. They remained together until his death.

For a brief time, he was invited by Frederick the Great, to Potsdam. Here, Voltaire wrote more articles of a scientific nature, but later incurred the displeasure of the king as he started satirising the abuses of power within the state.

In 1759, he wrote his best-known work – Candide, ou l’Optimisme ( Candide , or Optimism ) This was a satire on the philosophy of Leibniz. After a brief stay in Geneva, he settled for 20 years in Ferny on the French border.

In his later life, Voltaire continued to write and also to support persecuted religious minorities. He was visited by some of the leading European intellectuals of the day – such as James Boswell and Adam Smith.

In 1778, he died after shortly returning to Paris. Some of his enemies claimed he made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, but this is disputed.

In February of that year, fearing he would die, he wrote:

“I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.”

Voltaire was secretly buried before a pronouncement could be made public.

Three years after his death, on 11 July 1791, he was brought back to Paris to be enshrined in the Pantheon. It is said up to a million people came to see Voltaire – now considered a French hero and fore-runner of the French revolution.

Influence of Voltaire

• Voltaire revolutionised the art of history. He sought to avoid bias and included discussion of social and economic issues, moving away from dry military accounts.
• Voltaire argued for an extension of education, hoping greater literacy would free society from ignorance.
• Voltaire wrote poems and plays, including two epics. Voltaire politicised writing by showing that even poetry and romance could be laced with satire and political polemic. Often it was indirect criticism that was most effective.
• Voltaire was a passionate and persistent critic of those in power who misused their position. By attacking the abuses of the absolute monarchy and church, he paved the way for a less deferential attitude which was a significant underlying cause of the French revolution.
• At a time of religious persecution, Voltaire illustrated how religious dogmas were created by human ignorance and led to needless bloodshed and suffering.
• Voltaire was a key figure of the enlightenment which sought to use a range of scientific and literary books to explain the underlying nature of life. Voltaire believed no one book or dogma could explain everything. But, true understanding required the use of reason and an open mind.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. “ Biography of Voltaire” , Oxford, www.biographyonline.net – 3 February 2013. Last updated 7 February 2018.

Voltaire Quotes

“It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?”

– Voltaire A Treatise on Toleration (1763)

Candide – Voltaire

Candide – Voltaire at Amazon

The Portable Voltaire

The Portable Voltaire at Amazon

• World Biography

Voltaire Biography

Born: November 21, 1694 Paris, France Died: May 30, 1778 Paris, France French poet and philosopher

The French poet, dramatist, historian, and philosopher Voltaire was an outspoken and aggressive enemy of every injustice but especially of religious intolerance (the refusal to accept or respect any differences).

Early years

Voltaire was born as François Marie Arouet, perhaps on November 21, 1694, in Paris, France. He was the youngest of the three surviving children of François Arouet and Marie Marguerite Daumand, although Voltaire claimed to be the "bastard [born out of wedlock] of Rochebrune," a minor poet and songwriter. Voltaire's mother died when he was seven years old, and he developed a close relationship with his godfather, a free-thinker. His family belonged to the upper-middle-class, and young Voltaire was able to receive an excellent education. A clever child, Voltaire studied under the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand from 1704 to 1711. He displayed an astonishing talent for poetry and developed a love of the theater and literature.

Emerging poet

When Voltaire was drawn into the circle of the seventy-two-year-old poet Abbé de Chaulieu, his father packed him off to Caen, France. Hoping to stop his son's literary ambitions and to turn his mind to pursuing law, Arouet placed the youth as secretary to the French ambassador at The Hague, the seat of government in the Netherlands. Voltaire fell in love with a French refugee, Catherine Olympe Dunoyer, who was pretty but barely educated. Their marriage was stopped. Under the threat of a lettre de cachet (an official letter from a government calling for the arrest of a person) obtained by his father, Voltaire returned to Paris in 1713 and was contracted to a lawyer. He continued to write and he renewed his pleasure-loving acquaintances. In 1717 Voltaire was at first exiled (forced to leave) and then imprisoned in the Bastille, an enormous French prison, for writings that were offensive to powerful people.

While Voltaire stayed in England (1726–1728) he was greatly honored; Alexander Pope (1688–1744), William Congreve (1670–1729), Horace Walpole (1717–1797), and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1658–1751), praised him; and his works earned Voltaire one thousand pounds. Voltaire learned English by attending the theater daily, script in hand. He also absorbed English thought, especially that of John Locke (1632–1704) and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and he saw the relationship between free government and creative business developments. More importantly, England suggested the relationship of wealth to freedom. The only protection, even for a brilliant poet, was wealth.

At Cirey and at court, 1729–1753

Voltaire returned to France in 1729. One product of his English stay was the Lettres anglaises (1734), which have been called "the first bomb dropped on the Old Regime." Their explosive potential (something that shows future promise) included such remarks as, "It has taken centuries to do justice to humanity, to feel it was horrible that the many should sow and the few should reap." Written in the style of letters to a friend in France, the twenty-four "letters" were a clever and seductive (desirable) call for political, religious, and philosophic (having to do with knowledge) freedom; for the betterment of earthly life; for employing the method of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Locke, and Newton; and generally for striving toward social progress.

Prior to 1753 Voltaire did not have a home; but for fifteen years following 1733 he had stayed in Cirey, France, in a château (country house) owned by Madame du Châtelet. While still living with her patient husband and son, Émilie made generous room for Voltaire. They were lovers; and they worked together intensely on physics and metaphysics, a philosophy which investigates the nature of reality.

Honored by a respectful correspondence with Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786), Voltaire was then sent on diplomatic (having to do with international affairs) missions to Prussia. But Voltaire's new interest was his affair with his widowed niece, Madame Denis. This affair continued its passionate and stormy course to the last years of his life. Émilie, too, found solace in other lovers. The simple and peaceful time of Cirey ended with her death in 1749.

Voltaire then accepted Frederick's repeated invitation to live at court. He arrived at Potsdam (now in Germany) with Madame Denis in July 1750. First flattered by Frederick's hospitality, Voltaire then gradually became anxious, quarrelsome, and finally bored. He left, angry, in March 1753, having written in December 1752: "I am going to write for my instruction a little dictionary used by Kings. 'My friend' means 'my slave.'" Frederick took revenge by delaying permission for Voltaire's return to France, by putting him under a week's house arrest at the German border, and by seizing all his money.

Sage of Ferney, 1753–1778

Voltaire's literary productivity did not slow down, although his concerns shifted as the years passed while at his estate in Ferney, France. He was best known as a poet until in 1751 Le Siècle de Louis XIV marked him also as a historian. Other historical works include Histoire de Charles XII; Histoire de la Russie sous Pierre le Grand; and the universal history, Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, published in 1756 but begun at Cirey. An extremely popular dramatist until 1760, he began to be outdone by competition from the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) that he had introduced to France.

The philosophic conte (a short story about adventure) was a Voltaire invention. In addition to his famous Candide (1759), others of his stories in this style include Micromégas, Vision de Babouc, Memnon, Zadig, and Jeannot et Colin. In addition to the Lettres Philosophiques and the work on Newton (1642–1727), others of Voltaire's works considered philosophic are Philosophie de l'histoire, Le Philosophe ignorant, Tout en Dieu, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, and Traité de la métaphysique. Voltaire's poetry includes—in addition to the Henriade —the philosophic poems L'Homme, La Loi naturelle, and Le Désastre de Lisbonne, as well as the famous La Pucelle, a delightfully naughty poem about Joan of Arc (1412–1431).

Always the champion of liberty, Voltaire in his later years became actively involved in securing justice for victims of persecution, or intense harassment. He became the "conscience of Europe." His activity in the Calas affair was typical. An unsuccessful and depressed young man had hanged himself in his Protestant father's home in Roman Catholic city of Toulouse, France. For two hundred years Toulouse had celebrated the massacre (cruel killings) of four thousand of its Huguenot inhabitants (French Protestants). When the rumor spread that the dead man had been about to abandon Protestantism, the family was seized and tried for murder. The father was tortured; a son was exiled (forced to leave); and the daughters were forcefully held in a convent (a house for nuns). Investigation assured Voltaire of their innocence, and from 1762 to 1765 he worked in their behalf. He employed "his friends, his purse, his pen, his credit" to move public opinion to the support of the Calas family. In 1765, Parliament declared the Calas family innocent.

Voltaire's influence continued to be felt after his death in Paris on May 30, 1778.

For More Information

Carlson, Marvin. Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Mason, Haydn. Voltaire: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

McLean, Jack. Hopeless But Not Serious: The Autobiography of the Urban Voltaire. Edinburgh, Scotland: Mainstream Pub. Projects, 1996.

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Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays , poems, novels, essays, histories, but also scientific expositions . He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. [7] Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance and religious dogma , as well as the French institutions of his day. His best-known work and magnum opus , Candide , is a novella which comments on, criticizes and ridicules many events, thinkers and philosophies of his time, most notably Gottfried Leibniz and his belief that our world is the "best of all possible worlds". [8] [9]

Voltaire: A Biography

Voltaire (françois-marie arouet )  (1694-1778).

François-Marie Arouet (nicknamed ‘Voltaire,’) was a French philosopher, poet, pamphleteer and fiction writer. Candide , a novel, is the work that has lasted best, still thriving in the modern world. It is widely taught in French schools and universities and French departments in universities worldwide. The British literary critic, Martin Seymour-Smith, named it as one of the hundred most influential books ever written. It is included in the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World . The novel has influenced modern writers of dark satirical humour such as Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern and Kurt Vonnegut. Its brand of parody and the picaresque methods Voltaire uses have become standard techniques of black humorists.

Voltaire was a versatile writer, writing in almost every literary form – including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken champion of liberty, at great danger to himself. He was a staunch critic of the intolerance, religious dogma, and French institutions of his time.

The influence of Voltaire’s writings, particular Candide , on subsequent literature, has been profound. Some twentieth-century works influenced by Candide are novels of dystopian science fiction, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , George Orwell ’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We .

Portrait of Voltaire

Some of the modern genres in literature have been influenced by Candide , for example, the 20th century’s Theatre of the Absurd. The Voltaire scholar, Hadyn Mason, cites similarities between Candide and Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot . Becket has acknowledged the influence of Voltaire on his work. Several novelists have based their novels more squarely on Candide . It has also been made into an opera by Leonard Bernstein, and there have been a number of films, including the 1973 the BBC featuring it in its Play of the Month series.

Voltaire was enormously influential in the development of a modern approach to history, demonstrating fresh ways to look at the past. His best-known histories are The Age of Louis XIV (1751), and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). The latter traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context and rejected both nationalism and the Christian frame of reference that had been the tradition in history writing. Voltaire was thefirst scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks in favour of economics, culture and political history.

Voltaire’s influence as a philosopher is incalculable. Western thinking has been conditioned to a large extent by such of his statements as:

• ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’
• ‘Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing’
• ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him’
• ‘God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh’

…and many others that are familiar to us and whichwe use in our everyday speech.

Read biographies of all of the 30 greatest writers ever >>

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10 Things You Should Know About Voltaire

By: Evan Andrews

Updated: August 8, 2023 | Original: November 21, 2014

1. The origins of his famous pen name are unclear.

Voltaire had a strained relationship with his father, who discouraged his literary aspirations and tried to force him into a legal career. Possibly to show his rejection of his father’s values, he dropped his family name and adopted the nom de plume “Voltaire” upon completing his first play in 1718.

Voltaire never explained the meaning of his pen name, so scholars can only speculate on its origins. The most popular theory maintains the name is an anagram of a certain Latinized spelling of “Arouet,” but others have claimed it was a reference to the name of a family chateau or a nod to the nickname “volontaire” (volunteer), which Voltaire may have been given as a sarcastic reference to his stubbornness.

2. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year. 

Voltaire’s caustic wit first got him into trouble with the authorities in May 1716, when he was briefly exiled from Paris for composing poems mocking the French regent’s family. The young writer was unable to bite his tongue, however, and only a year later he was arrested and confined to the Bastille for writing scandalous verse implying the regent had an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

Voltaire boasted that his cell gave him some quiet time to think, and he eventually did 11 months behind bars before winning a release. He later endured another short stint in the Bastille in April 1726, when he was arrested for planning to duel an aristocrat that had insulted and beaten him. To escape further jail time, he voluntarily exiled himself to England, where he remained for nearly three years.

3. He became hugely wealthy by exploiting a flaw in the French lottery.

In 1729, Voltaire teamed with mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine and others to exploit a lucrative loophole in the French national lottery. The government shelled out massive prizes for the contest each month, but an error in calculation meant that the payouts were larger than the value of all the tickets in circulation. With this in mind, Voltaire, La Condamine and a syndicate of other gamblers were able to repeatedly corner the market and rake in massive winnings.

The scheme left Voltaire with a windfall of nearly half a million francs, setting him up for life and allowing him to devote himself solely to his literary career.

4. He was an extraordinary prolific writer.

Voltaire wrote more than 50 plays, dozens of treatises on science, politics and philosophy, and several books of history on everything from the Russian Empire to the French Parliament. Along the way, he also managed to squeeze in heaps of verse and a voluminous correspondence amounting to some 20,000 letters to friends and contemporaries.

Voltaire supposedly kept up his prodigious output by spending up to 18 hours a day writing or dictating to secretaries, often while still in bed. He may have also been fueled by heroic amounts of caffeine—according to some sources, he drank as many as 40 cups a day.

5. Many of his most famous works were banned.

Since his writing denigrated everything from organized religion to the justice system, Voltaire ran up against frequent censorship from the French government. A good portion of his work was suppressed, and the authorities even ordered certain books to be burned by the state executioner.

To combat the censors, Voltaire had much of his output printed abroad, and he published under a veil of assumed names and pseudonyms. His famous novella “Candide” was originally attributed to a “Dr. Ralph,” and he actively tried to distance himself from it for several years after both the government and the church condemned it.

Despite his best attempts to remain anonymous, Voltaire lived in almost constant fear of arrest. He was forced to flee to the French countryside after his “Letters Concerning the English Nation” was released in 1734, and he went on to spend the majority of his later life in unofficial exile in Switzerland.

6. He helped popularize the famous tale about Sir Isaac Newton and the apple.

Though the two never met in person, Voltaire was an enthusiastic acolyte of the English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Upon receiving a copy of Newton’s “Principia Mathematica,” he claimed he knelt down before it in reverence, “as was only right.”

Voltaire played a key role in popularizing Newton’s ideas, and he offered one of the first accounts of how the famed scientist developed his theories on gravity. In his 1727 “Essay on Epic Poetry,” Voltaire wrote that Newton “had the first thought of his System of Gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree.”

Voltaire wasn’t the original source for the story of the “Eureka!” moment, as has often been claimed, but his account was instrumental in making it a fabled part of Newton’s biography.

7. He had a brief career as a spy for the French government.

Voltaire struck up a lively correspondence with Frederick the Great in the late 1730s, and he later made several journeys to meet the Prussian monarch in person. Before one of these visits in 1743, Voltaire concocted an ill-advised scheme to use his new position to repair his reputation with the French court. After hatching a deal to serve as a government informant, he wrote several letters to the French giving inside dope on Frederick’s foreign policy and finances.

Voltaire proved a lousy spy, however, and his plan quickly fell apart after Frederick grew suspicious of his motives. The two nevertheless remained close friends—some have even claimed they were lovers—and Voltaire later moved to Prussia in 1750 to take a permanent position in the Frederick’s court. Their relationship finally soured in 1752, after Voltaire made a series of scathing attacks on the head of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Frederick responded by lambasting Voltaire, and ordered that a satirical pamphlet he had written be publicly burned. Voltaire left the court for good in 1753, supposedly telling a friend, “I was enthusiastic about [Frederick] for 16 years, but he has cured me of this long illness.”

8. He never married or fathered children.

While Voltaire technically died a bachelor, his personal life was a revolving door of mistresses, paramours and long-term lovers. He carried out a famous 16-year affair with the brilliant—and very married—author and scientist Émilie du Châtelet, and later had a committed, though secretive, partnership with his own niece, Marie-Louise Mignot. The two lived as a married couple from the early 1750s until his death, and they even adopted a child in 1760, when they took in a destitute young woman named Marie- Françoise Corneille. Voltaire later paid the dowry for Corneille’s marriage, and often referred to Mignot and himself as her “parents.”

9. He set up a successful watchmaking business in his old age.

While living in Ferney, France, in the 1770s, Voltaire joined with a group of Swiss horologists in starting a watchmaking business at his estate. With the septuagenarian Voltaire acting as manager and financier, the endeavor soon grew into a village-wide industry, and Ferney watches came to rival some of the best in Europe.

“Our watches are very well made,” he once wrote to the French ambassador to the Vatican, “very handsome, very good and cheap.”

Voltaire saw the enterprise as a way to prop up the Ferney economy, and he used his vast network of upper class contacts to find prospective buyers. Among others, he eventually succeeded in peddling his wares to the likes of Catherine the Great of Russia and King Louis XV of France.

10. He continued causing controversy even in death.

Voltaire died in Paris in 1778, just a few months after returning to the city for the first time in 28 years to oversee the production of one of his plays. Over the last few days of his life, Catholic Church officials repeatedly visited Voltaire—a lifelong deist who was often critical of organized religion—in the hope of persuading him to retract his opinions and make a deathbed confession. The great writer was unmoved, and supposedly brushed off the priests by saying, “let me die in peace.”

His refusal meant that he was officially denied a Christian burial, but his friends and family managed to arrange a secret interment in the Champagne region of France before the order became official.

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How Voltaire Went from Bastille Prisoner to Famous Playwright

Three hundred years ago this week, the French philosopher and writer began his career with a popular retelling of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus’

Lorraine Boissoneault

François-Marie d’Arouet was the kind of precocious teen who always got invited to the best parties. Earning a reputation for his wit and catchy verses among the elites of 18th-century Paris, the young writer got himself exiled to the countryside in May 1716 for writing criticism of the ruling family. But Arouet—who would soon adopt the pen name “Voltaire”—was only getting started in his takedowns of those in power. In the coming years, those actions would have far more drastic repercussions: imprisonment for him, and a revolution for his country. And it all started with a story of incest.

In 1715, the young Arouet began a daunting new project: adapting the story of Oedipus for a contemporary French audience. The ancient Greek tale chronicles the downfall of Oedipus, who fulfilled a prophecy that he would kill his father, the king of Thebes, and marry his mother. Greek playwright Sophocles wrote the earliest version of the play in his tragedy, Oedipus Rex . As recently as 1659, the famed French dramatist Pierre Corneille had adapted the play, but Arouet thought the story deserved an update, and he happened to be living at the perfect time to give it one.

On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV (also known as the “Sun King”) died without leaving a clear successor. One of the most powerful rulers in the history of France, raising its fortunes and expanding colonial holdings, Louis also dragged the country into three major wars. He centralized power in France and elevated the Catholic Church by ruthlessly persecuting French Protestants. The king’s only son predeceased him, as did his grandson. His great-grandson, at age 5, needed a regent to oversee the ruling of the state. That duty fell to Philippe Duc d’Orléans, who used his position to essentially rule the country as Regent until his own death.

Philippe change the geopolitical trajectory of France, forming alliances with Austria, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. He also upended the old social order, opposing censorship and allowing once-banned books to be reprinted. The atmosphere “changed radically as the country came under the direction of a man who lived in the Palais-Royal, at the heart of Paris, and was widely known to indulge mightily in the pleasures of the table, the bottle, and the flesh—including, it was no less commonly believed, the flesh of his daughter, the duchesse de Berry,” writes Roger Pearson in Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom .

For Arouet, the loosening of social restrictions created an almost limitless sense of possibilities, and harnessing theater was perhaps the most effective way to spread the message of freedom and tolerance to the public.

“Voltaire estimated that only five percent of the population in Europe could read in his Letters on England in 1733,” says Gail Noyer, the editor and translator of Voltaire’s Revolution: Writings From His Campaign to Free Laws From Religion . “So [public performances of] plays had far more influence than books did, until much later in the century.”

As for where his work would be performed, only one choice presented itself, even though Paris hosted multiple theaters. “The Comédie Française had a virtual monopoly as the only theatre authorized and supervised by the court for the staging of tragedies and serious dramas,” writes Ian Davidson in Voltaire: A Life . “Almost anybody who wanted to be a writer wanted to write for the Comédie Française.”

Arouet worked feverishly on his play, Oedipe , only for it to be rejected by the Comédie Française. Still, the theater didn’t give him an absolute dismissal, instead suggesting revisions, which he continued hacking away at for several years. Finally, on January 19, 1717, the theatre agreed to put on a revised form of the play.

But the timing for Arouet’s success couldn’t have been worse. While he’d been at work on his play, Arouet continued to write popular verses that were shared among his friends—including a piece that referenced the rumors of the Regent’s incestuous conduct with his daughter:

“It is not the son, it is the father;

It is the daughter, and not the mother;

So far, so good.

They have already made Eteocles;

If suddenly he loses his two eyes;

That would be a true story for Sophocles.”

The verse clearly pointed to the Regent , Philippe, and his relationship with his daughter, and even for the permissive ruler, it was a bridge too far. On May 16, 1717, Arouet was arrested and taken to the formidable Bastille. He tried to plead innocence in his case, claiming he wasn’t the one who’d written the verses, but he had already admitted authorship to several friends—friends who turned out to be spies. “Conditions in the Bastille were harsh and oppressive, with its ten-foot walls, its ‘triple locks, and grills and bolts and bars’, and with poor food and no sunlight,” Davidson writes . Even worse, Arouet had no idea when he might be set free, if ever. His case never went through any type of judicial process; the length of his detention depended solely on the whim of the Regent.

After 11 months, the Regency decided to show mercy to Arouet, releasing him on Holy Thursday, April 14, 1718. Arouet was placed on the 18th-century equivalent of house arrest for several more months, but was finally allowed free entry in and out of Paris, and on November 18, 1718, the young man who had started to address himself as “Voltaire” had the first major success of his life: the staging of Oedipe at the Comédie Française.

The play was immensely popular, going on to run for a nearly unprecedented 32 performances, Davidson writes. Perhaps some of that popularity stemmed from the Regent’s titillating scandals. But Voltaire didn’t just attack hereditary monarchy; he also leveled charges against the corrupt power of the Church. In one of the playwright’s most famous lines, Queen Jocasta says , “Our priests are not what the foolish people imagine; their wisdom is based solely on our credulity.” Considering how powerful the Catholic Church remained, it was a dangerous dig to make—but one audiences thrilled to hear.

“Generally, the moral content of earlier plays stressed love of God and king, patriotic duty and the like,” writes literary historian Marcus Allen . “In the hands of Voltaire, however, the play itself became the primary vehicle for launching attacks upon the evils of the ancien régime.”

The popularity of the play catapulted Voltaire to true fame, but it also taught him of the dangers that accompanied outspokenness. As he continued writing plays, poems, letters and stories, Voltaire faced an increasing number of critics as well as fans, and would be exiled from France multiple times over the course of his life for offending the Catholic Church and the monarchy. But Voltaire’s stays in England, Holland, Belgium and Prussia exposed him to some of the era’s greatest Enlightenment figures; he was the first to bring the writings of Isaac Newton and philosopher John Locke to France. With his condemnation of torture, war, religious persecution and absolute monarchy, Voltaire paved the way for the ideas that would fuel the French Revolution in 1789, and inspired great American intellects like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Yet according to Noyer, much of that legacy is forgotten today.

“The only thing people seem to know anymore is Candide,” Noyer says, referencing a satirical novel about the dangers of optimism. “I think it’s only chosen as a safe subject, because it certainly wasn’t a big deal in his lifetime.” For Noyer, the real masterpiece is how much Voltaire managed to achieve with his words: helping to inspire the French Revolution and teaching people to think more critically about religious intolerance and injustice.

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Lorraine Boissoneault | | READ MORE

Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

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Philosophy Books » The Enlightenment

The best voltaire books, recommended by nicholas cronk.

Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas Cronk

The eighteenth-century philosopher wielded his powers of ridicule and witticism against religious fanatics—but always championed free speech and religious toleration. He was also a historian, scientist, poet, playwright, and political activist. Nicholas Cronk , General Editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire gives a detailed look at the polymathic philosophe .

Interview by Charles J. Styles

Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom by Roger Pearson

A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary by John Fletcher (translator) & Voltaire

The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment by J. B. Shank

Candide by Roger Pearson (translator) & Voltaire

Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-Century France by Stephen Bird

1 Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom by Roger Pearson

2 a pocket philosophical dictionary by john fletcher (translator) & voltaire, 3 the newton wars and the beginning of the french enlightenment by j. b. shank, 4 candide by roger pearson (translator) & voltaire, 5 reinventing voltaire: the politics of commemoration in nineteenth-century france by stephen bird.

H e was born Francois-Marie Arouet in 1694, but assumed the title “Voltaire” some twenty years later. Who was Voltaire?

Voltaire is the most famous of the Enlightenment thinkers. Not necessarily the most radical or the most extreme philosophe , but certainly the one with the highest profile. In French, we speak of the seventeenth century as the ‘Century of Louis XIV’ (an expression that Voltaire himself put into circulation). But we refer to the eighteenth century as the ‘Century of Voltaire’. He’s remembered nowadays as the author of the short comic novel Candide , but he wrote a vast amount over a very long lifetime. He was born in the last days of the seventeenth century and died at the age of 84, just a decade before the beginning of the French Revolution.

“He’s famous already when he’s quite young, but after the 1760s, Voltaire is more than famous; he’s a superstar”

His first play is accepted by the Comédie-Française at the age of 24—so he becomes an instant star. And what is this first play? It’s about Oedipus killing his father. Now, Voltaire never really liked his own father, François Arouet—he was a lawyer at court. When this play is published, it’s the first time the name “Voltaire” is printed on a title page. So, his first big literary triumph is when he abandons his father’s name and invents a new name for himself. You don’t have to be a Freudian to think there’s something going on there.

Now, this is plausible. Other theories say the name evokes a property his parents owned. Personally, I think the name ‘Voltaire’ is hugely evocative: voler means to fly, and volter means to leap about, making him sound like some character out of commedia dell’arte , leaping around the stage.

So, when we talk about ‘Voltaire’, we take for granted a name he invented. You might say it is one of his earliest and most successful fictions. And we are all complicit in his invention. It’s an odd fact, but it seems impossible to imagine writing a book about ‘François-Marie Arouet’. In time, ‘Voltaire’ becomes pretty much a brand name. He’s famous already when he’s quite young, but after the 1760s, he’s more than famous; he’s a superstar. For the last two decades of his life, he’s a huge European celebrity. He’s arguably the first.

I say ‘arguably’ because Rousseau could be a contender. Voltaire and Rousseau are the first real European literary celebrities. They are celebrities in the sense that they sell; their names sell books. Voltaire is a true celebrity in the sense that everyone has heard of him, even if they haven’t read him. That two-syllable name became very powerful. If he had stayed ‘Arouet’, it wouldn’t have had the same punch to it.

You are General Editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire , which spans some 200 volumes. From epic poetry to historical treatises and philosophical tales, the breadth of Voltaire’s literary output is astonishing. Can you give a sense of how widely he wrote?

It’s an extraordinary fact, but there is still no scholarly edition of the totality of Voltaire’s writings. Voltaire himself was rather selective in putting together the so-called collected editions that appeared in his lifetime, and after his death grew an editorial tradition that ignored totally the textual integrity of many of his most important works. To remap comprehensively his writings in their entirety is a huge task—and an expensive one.

The project to produce the ongoing Complete Works of Voltaire began, rather tentatively, in the 1960s, and in the mid-1970s it moved to the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, thanks to a benefaction from the Voltaire scholar Theodore Besterman. We are now steaming full ahead, and the complete edition, the first ever comprehensive printing of everything that Voltaire wrote, will be finished in around 200 volumes by the end of 2020—when we are hoping to present a full set to President Macron!

Voltaire writes in virtually every literary genre. As a very young man, he writes fairly traditional satirical poetry that makes fun of the government and the church. But he revered all the classical models. His first serious literary works are classical tragedies—like his Oedipus —and also an epic poem. This is quite a big deal for a young poet that is starting off. He decides he’s going to write the great French epic. There had been a number of French epics written in France in the seventeenth century, but none of the seventeenth-century poets were on a par with Homer or Virgil. So, Voltaire decides he will be the new Virgil.

It was going to be the epic poem to create the foundational myth of modern France. He writes it about Henry IV. Of course, already it’s a pretty tendentious subject: Henry IV is the protestant king of Navarre at a time in the late sixteenth century when France was torn apart by a bloody civil war. Eventually, Henry IV changes religion; he becomes a Catholic and puts an end to the civil strife, effectively becoming the king of a united France. For Voltaire, this is a great founding myth, because it’s about the king overriding religious fanaticism and bringing peace and tolerance and unity. In its final form, it’s called La Henriade —‘The Poem of Henry’. It was regarded in his lifetime as his most significant achievement, translated into every known European language multiple times. Yet it’s a work that we’ve now almost completely forgotten.

You couldn’t imagine Rousseau or Diderot or Montesquieu starting off in such a classical way. But then, as Voltaire finds his feet and becomes a bit more controversial, he starts to write in different forms. He’s immensely important as a historian: he writes a history of the reign of Louis XIV, a brilliantly written work that is also a key text in establishing the myth of the Sun King and the cultural pre-eminence of the French seventeenth century. This remained in France the standard treatment of Louis XIV until Ernest Lavisse in the early twentieth century (and even Lavisse is heavily influenced by the Voltairean model). Perhaps most important of all, Voltaire writes a universal history, his Essay on Manners— one of the first attempts by a European to write a global history not exclusively focused on Christian Europe. Voltaire is an enormous influence on other Enlightenment historians, like Edward Gibbon and David Hume.

“Voltaire is an enormous influence on other Enlightenment historians, like Edward Gibbon and David Hume”

Voltaire also writes large numbers of plays. Starting with Œdipe , as we said, he continues writing plays all through his life, mainly tragedies, but also comedies, and even opera libretti, two of which were set to music by Rameau for the court in the 1740s. And most of all, he is a brilliant writer of short prose texts (which he variously calls ‘articles’, ‘letters’, or ‘chapters’) that he gathers together more or less coherently in various miscellaneous collections. Some of them are stories, the works we know as ‘philosophical fictions’ (a title that we have invented, it is not Voltaire’s), and these are constantly translated and reprinted. They have become today Voltaire’s best known works.

But for the rest, we hardly know all of his other brief essays and chapters, on science, philosophy, ethics, literary criticism, and so forth. Voltaire is the undisputed genius of the brief text. And he understands that you can write short texts and then reassemble them in ever-changing miscellaneous volumes. That increasingly becomes his characteristic mode of expression in later years.

The only genre that he doesn’t write in is one that was then very fashionable: the new sentimental novel. He particularly loathes Richardson, who was hugely popular. When someone asked him if he had read Clarissa , he replied yes, but that he wouldn’t want to be condemned to have to re-read it. Of course, his short philosophical tales—his contes —often parody Richardson and the techniques of the contemporary novel.

Let’s talk about Voltaire’s intellectual voice. He’s well-known as the master of the witticism, as always imbuing his writing with ridicule, irony, and satire. Is this purely for comedic reasons? Or is it partly an attempt to be elusive, to cover his own tracks about what he actually believes?

All of that, really. He is, of course, a very funny writer. He is brilliantly ironical. But he wasn’t the first writer to use irony to get around awkwardness. Fontenelle, for example, when faced by the dogmatism of the church and asked to state his beliefs about miracles, is hilariously ironical—and he is of the generation before Voltaire.

Of course, Voltaire learns from him. In the article “Miracles” in the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary , he explains soberly that miracles are happenings that seem to defy the normal laws of science, before concluding:

It’s dearly to be wished . . . that for a miracle to be properly certified, it should be done in the presence of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, or the Royal Society in London . . .

Similarly, Hume and Gibbon would be ironical on the subject of miracles, for reasons of humour, and also, as you suggest, to slightly cover their traces. Hume cannot afford to upset needlessly the good church people of Edinburgh, any more than Voltaire can afford to create more enemies unnecessarily. It’s quite an Enlightenment trope: you hint at what you think, but don’t go out of your way to offend people.

Irony, of course, defines Voltaire’s voice. The third chapter of Candide is a full-out attack on the barbarity of war, and it opens in typical style: “Never was there anything so fine, so dashing, so glittering, or so well regulated as those two armies” (Roger Pearson’s translation). What follows is equally ironical, although the tone darkens very suddenly:

First the cannon felled about six thousand men on each side. Then the musketry removed from the best of all possible worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who were poisoning its surface . . .

There is more than one ironical voice at play here. And beyond just irony, what Voltaire does brilliantly is ridicule. It’s his power; he can destroy a person or an idea in a single sentence. In another short tale, “An Adventure in India” ( Aventure indienne ), there is a hilarious description of Bacchus “walking across the Red Sea without wetting his feet”; these details, the narrator notes, are “faithfully recorded in the Orphic oracles.”

“Beyond just irony, what Voltaire does brilliantly is ridicule”

For Voltaire to imply an equivalence between Bacchus and Moses is amusing (of course, he was familiar with the current of scholarship that deliberately sought out comparisons between mythological and Christian figures), but to hint that biblical scriptures might be as fanciful as mythological accounts is seriously provocative. And of course, established authorities—whether it be the government, the church, or whatever—hate that. They cannot bear being ridiculed. That’s why, for example, if you are trying to understand the lines of tension in the Enlightenment—trying, for example, to draw an ideological line between deism and atheism, the Jonathan Israel divide between radical and moderate Enlightenments—you often find that it doesn’t really work unless you take style, humour, irony, ridicule into account.

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If you look at the books that were censored by the Vatican (a handy measure of what upset the Catholic Church), you find that they censor Voltaire more assiduously than out-and-out atheists. This makes sense because from their standpoint, his voice reaches more people, and is therefore more dangerous. What they care about is the subversive voice actually upsetting the largest number of the faithful. So, the nuances of whether you were deist or atheist didn’t really matter so much—it was the people who were causing the biggest waves and the most trouble that mattered. In one sense, Voltaire is more ‘radical’ insofar as he upsets more people. A dry philosophical dismantling of some argument doesn’t upset the church anywhere near as much as someone who ridicules them.

It’s interesting as well that the Vatican is perfectly happy to endorse Voltaire when the object of his ridicule isn’t the Christian religion. Didn’t the Pope endorse Voltaire’s comic play about Mohammed?

Yes. He wrote a play about Mohammed and obtained a letter from Benedict XIV attesting that that he enjoyed the play. Of course, being Voltaire, he printed the letter as the preface to the play. It’s not absolutely clear that he had the pontiff’s permission to do this, however . . .

“The Catholic Church censors Voltaire more assiduously than it censored out-and-out atheists”

Let’s turn to the books. Your first choice is Voltaire Almighty: The Pursuit of Freedom by Roger Pearson.

I chose this one because I think it’s by far the best modern life of Voltaire. First of all, because it’s written in an incredibly rhythmic and even jaunty style. It’s also got some good jokes. Roger Pearson is not just a good biographer; he’s also a distinguished Voltaire scholar. It’s not quite written in the style of Voltaire, but he certainly presents Voltaire as though he were the hero of one of his own fictions. Given Voltaire’s self-invention, I think it’s smart not to treat him in an overly pious or serious way.

Roger Pearson gets the underlying facetiousness of his subject and perfectly captures the idea that Voltaire was always performing. Voltaire loved acting, especially in his own plays. This becomes increasingly true in later life as he becomes a celebrity. The name ‘Voltaire’ becomes hugely famous. All celebrities (to some extent) have to inhabit the structures that have been created for them. You wouldn’t say he was a victim of his celebrity—if only because he knows how to handle it. But he responds to celebrity by acting himself even more. Roger Pearson brings this out beautifully. In that sense, it’s the most amusing of the modern biographies, and also the most truthful.

In terms of his life, the chapter on the Calas affair is particularly interesting. Can you tell us about the Calas affair and how it impacted Voltaire’s intellectual formation?

Without being too simplistic, I am tempted to look at Voltaire’s career in two parts: pre-Calas and post-Calas. The Calas affair is something that absolutely rocked France in the early 1760s. Calas was a prosperous merchant in Toulouse, the head of a protestant family in a heavily Catholic city. One of his sons was found dead in his house. The police came in and arrested the father for murdering his son. It was said in court that his son was going to convert to Catholicism and that his father had murdered him to prevent this ( et pour encourager les autres , Voltaire would have said).

The evidence was slim, but the judges were trenchant and Calas was sentenced to death. It was a particularly gruesome death. He was torn limb from limb by four horses in a square in Toulouse, in a public spectacle. The death took several hours. From our perspective, the execution seems like some barbaric medieval torture. And, under the ancien régime , if you were condemned in that way, then your family was dispossessed, so his widow and children were left penniless.

Voltaire is asked if he would help. He becomes interested in the case and pretty quickly draws the conclusion that this was an act of religious prejudice—the judges were all Catholic and they hadn’t gone through any formal due process for the accused protestant man. The legal system of the ancien régime is of course very alien to us. The accused wasn’t allowed to know the terms of the accusation in the court; he had no right to question the evidence. From our perspective, it’s a very strange form of justice.

So, Voltaire takes it up. He writes a whole series of pamphlets and letters to people in authority, many of which he publishes. He writes a book called the Treatise on Toleration, which I could also have chosen, specifically addressing the Calas affair. This episode really brings out everything that is most brilliant about Voltaire. He originally trained as a lawyer although he soon gave it up because he didn’t like the law (probably all part of rejecting his father). But he does have a lawyer’s mind. The Calas affair makes him think about the legal system of the ancien régime , which he perhaps hadn’t really done before. And he comes to it with a lawyer’s acuity. When he sees a flaw in an argument, he can use ridicule like no one else.

“The Calas Affair really brings out everything that is most brilliant about Voltaire”

He just dismantles the arguments of the judges in Toulouse, but in an incredibly clever way. He doesn’t just condemn them wholesale; he appeals to the more senior judges in Paris, who see themselves as far superior to the provincial judges in Toulouse. He gets them to revoke the Toulouse judges’ decision. You might say that’s another example of him colluding with those in power. Tactically, it’s incredibly clever because he’s got the senior court revoking the decision of the ‘junior’ court—he’s got the system fighting itself from within.

It takes a couple of years, but Calas is finally pardoned. Though it’s too late for him, it helps his widow and his children. Voltaire learns several things from this episode. He’s now much more critical of how the ancien régime and its legal system works. But if this had happened 50 years earlier, it wouldn’t have had the same resonance. The reason the incident has the impact it does is partly because of his writing’s brilliance, but also partly how quickly it spread once published—not just around France but Europe.

The Calas judgement becomes, in European public opinion, the Calas affair . Newspapers are more fast-moving and frequent than they had been 50 years earlier, and they are beginning to play a role in shaping public opinion. One of the things about the Enlightenment is that it created—and needed—public opinion. Issues of all sorts are now discussed not just by a narrow group of intellectuals or philosophers, but by a broader reading public.

And the Calas affair is perfect for public opinion, because from every possible angle it’s a great human story. Voltaire’s brochures and pamphlets—some of which are brilliantly funny and clever—are not only translated into English, but also printed in the English provincial press. We didn’t really know this until quite recently, since it’s all been digitised. Calas became a current affair.

Let’s take a look at Voltaire’s A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary. This was published in 1764, shortly after Calas’ name had been cleared. You’ve described this book as “one of the most explosive and controversial works of the European Enlightenment and one of the funniest”.

This book is a series of short squibs on different topics, all, broadly speaking, concerning the Bible and the history of the church, and all designed to make you reflect on what pious Catholics thought were absolute certainties. In the opening article of the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary , Voltaire relates the biblical account of Abraham, making it abundantly clear that the biblical chronology simply defies common sense and reason. In effect, this is a withering attack on the reliability of the Old Testament accounts, but Voltaire maintains a ‘neutral’ voice throughout, and then concludes like this: “The reader is referred to these commentaries, all of them compiled by men subtle and delicate intellect, excellent thinkers, quite devoid of prejudice and not in the least pedantic.” I am quoting here from John Fletcher’s superb translation in the Oxford World Classics series.

An important feature of this translation is that John Fletcher keeps the often conversational tone of Voltaire’s ‘philosophical’ style, and doesn’t try to normalise it. These shifts of linguistic register are key to the shock of Voltaire’s irony. He devotes an entire article to circumcision, recounting drily the breadth of scholarship on the subject in order to make the point that the rite is not unique to the Jewish tradition. There is a serious point here about cultural relativism, but the choice of example, combined with the fake familiar tone of voice, make it quintessentially Voltairean:

When told that the Hottentots remove one testicle from each of their male children a Parisian is quite taken aback. The Hottentots are perhaps surprised that Parisians hang on to both of theirs.

And at other moments, Voltaire seems to be speaking to us directly. Here he is on the all too contemporary topic of fanaticism:

What can you say to a man who tells you that he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he’s certain he’ll go to heaven if he cuts your throat? Normally fanatics are led by scoundrels who supply the weapons . . .

This could have been written in a newspaper today, and it’s crucial that the language feels modern. That modern or colloquial feel is equally devastating in the eighteenth century. The church in particular hated it because of its sheer cheekiness—its rudeness and brashness, along with its refusal to treat churchmen with the pomp and ceremony they thought they deserved.

A key thing about the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary is that it’s very short. You can read the short articles in sequence, or you can dip in and start reading anywhere—either way, this is a very accessible work. It’s important the Oxford World Classics translation of the Philosophical Dictionary keeps the ‘portatif’ of the original title. This is the pocket philosophical dictionary, and at one level, it can be seen as a response to Diderot’s Encyclopédie .

The title ‘ Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ’ is implicitly a rebuke to that great work; you cannot walk about with seventeen folio volumes, but you can put this in your pocket. Partly what Voltaire is saying is that these huge books with their long articles are not a very effective way of changing public opinion. He writes a very funny letter to a friend saying that the authorities are never afraid of books that cost a lot of money. He says if the Bible had cost seventy sesterces in Ancient Rome, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. [ Laughs ]. Whereas a very small portable book—a paperback in today’s terms—that can be easily reprinted is a much more effective polemical weapon.

And it’s so very funny. I remember one section where he discusses a claim about a Jesuit priest who was said to have brought nine people back to life, but someone else claims that he only raised four—which, Voltaire concedes, “is still pretty good.” [ Laughs ]. And that only works with the colloquial turn of voice. That makes it so much more damaging. I chose this partly because the book is important—it’s hugely important—and partly because I think, of all the translations of Voltaire’s philosophical texts, this one really brings out the feel of the original.

In the book, Voltaire consistently pokes fun at religious doctrines. But unlike, say, the New Atheists, he is incredibly well-read on these topics. He shows an encyclopaedic knowledge of the biblical narratives but also reception history in the early church and ancient Near Eastern mythology. His critique, laced as it is with sardonic wit, is so informed.

In that respect, he’s very unlike Diderot or Rousseau. You could almost say Voltaire is a biblical scholar. He thinks the Old Testament is completely incoherent. Historically, it consists of different texts written by different people in different periods. He anticipates some of the nineteenth-century German historical criticism of the Bible. He’s saying that there are things here that are internally inconsistent; there are things that don’t make sense.

“You could almost say Voltaire is a biblical scholar”

He knows the Old Testament back to front, and there are certain details he keeps referring to. For example, there’s a chapter in Ezekiel where someone cooks something in sand and eats it. But, in some translation, Voltaire finds out that he eats shit. This becomes a running gag, that he eats a “ tartine de merde ”—which sounds hilarious, a “shit sandwich”—and Voltaire comes back to this something like a dozen times.

In the chapter on Moses in the Dictionary , he expresses his surprise that the Israelites could build a golden calf in the middle of the desert but didn’t have any one who could make shoes . . .

Yes, there’s an absurdist side to Voltaire’s humour that is very modern and completely speaks to us.

This book isn’t wholly facetious and ironic; there are moments of real anger and exasperation. There’s an entry which laments the moral myopia of thinkers who have turned a blind eye to the suffering involved in war.

I think he understands that if you keep indignation going for too many pages then it loses its oomph. If people want to be critical of Voltaire, a standard thing to say is: how can you take him seriously, if he makes fun of everything? But there’s another view, which is that to keep the interest of your readers, you need to keep changing your register; you need to have passion and you need to have humour. That will have more impact. Aesthetically, it’s an arguable point.

Taking him as a philosopher, what would you single out as his most original contribution to Western thought?

He lives a very long life, so you have to say that he evolves as he goes on. After the Calas affair, what Voltaire learns is that his forte is really in publicising affairs, so he gets interested in things like the reform of the judicial system. Much later, he reinvents himself as a political reformer. That’s more the image that has come down to posterity. We’ve largely forgotten the pre-Calas Voltaire.

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As a fairly young man, he comes to England in the 1720s. People always say that’s a key turning point, and it probably is. In England, he’s confronted by empiricism through the thought of Locke and Newton. That has a big impact. He’s learns English very quickly and meets a lot of famous writers, including Swift and Pope. He’s here for two and a half years and goes back to France and writes the book that is known in French as the Lettres philosophiques . It’s his most important early book—his first major masterpiece—and I would have included it if I had space. It came out in English first as Letters Concerning the English Nation in 1733. People forget that he wrote this for the English as well as for the French. He’s a European author who thinks about cultivating a European readership.

In this book, there is a philosophical programme which is essentially about the rise of empiricism. There’s a trajectory that he sketches out: Bacon begins to think of things empirically, then you get Newton, Locke, and the rise of empirical science. This focus on what’s empirically provable sets its face against Descartes who championed the notion of innate ideas. So, Voltaire puts together a sort of package about the heroic rise of empiricism against innate ideas. This is probably his most significant early philosophical contribution.

It’s not exactly an original philosophical position but what is original is the narrative he’s creating. Voltaire gives the Enlightenment group their defining story: their self-narrative. If you then go through the 18th century, if you look at d’Alembert’s ‘Discours préliminaire’ in the Encyclopédie , the underlying narrative of ideas is Voltaire’s: it’s that same template of Bacon, Locke, and Newton.

“Voltaire gives the Enlightenment group their defining story: their self-narrative”

Continuing the theme of empiricism, your next book is The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment by J B Shank. Can you tell me about this one?

I think this is a really important book because it helps us rethink the important early part of Voltaire’s career. The Lettres philosophiques is something of a political catastrophe because the censorship turns out to be far more severe than he had expected—and only on account of one letter. In Letter 13, Voltaire explores very tentatively whether Locke could be used to support a theory of materialism. This idea that the universe is made up of nothing apart from matter is commonly taken in the eighteenth century to be synonymous with atheism. Voltaire believes that he is being sufficiently elusive to slip by the censors, but this turns out to be a miscalculation.

The book is condemned in the strongest possible terms. Voltaire narrowly escapes prison in 1734, and effectively has to leave the capital in unofficial exile. At that point, he goes to the Château de Cirey, staying there for the next 15 years with Madame du Châtelet, who is now his lover and intellectual companion. After this scandal of the Lettres philosophiques , he wonders how he can regain his place in the Republic of Letters. He thinks that one way to do it might be by being more of a scientist. At that point in his career, he does think about being taken seriously as a scientific researcher.

For some years, there had been a major scientific debate about the movement of planets. You could look with a telescope and see that planets move in slightly strange shapes. So, you’ve got to try to explain their movement. Essentially, the Cartesian tradition said that that the atmosphere is filled and that there were vortices—these geometrical corkscrews—that are supposed to explain why planets move as they do. Newton came up with an idea that is totally different: he said that, actually, space is empty once you get out of the earth’s atmosphere. There is a void. But the planets move in the way they do because they are pulled by gravitational force.

What J B Shank shows is that the way in which the fight between the Newtonians and the Cartesians evolved was essentially an institutional war. In the history of ideas, particular theories do not triumph because they’re right or wrong. They triumph because a particular group or sect promoting those ideas is in the ascendant.

So it was with these two competing theories. Fontenelle was the secretary of the Academy of Science—a major position of power—and he espoused the Cartesian cause. There was a younger scientist, Maupertuis, who was much more persuaded by the Newtonian argument. From his correspondence with Maupertuis, Voltaire is quite clearly converted to the Newtonian faith (his term!), both intellectually but also sociologically—he wants to identify with the young turks.

In due course, he writes a book intended to explain Newton to a bigger audience called Elements of the Philosophy of Newton . In many ways, it’s a very un-Voltairean book; it’s a serious exposition of Newtonian thinking. It’s quite a big book too, with diagrams and pictures. It doesn’t have much Voltairean humour in it but he’s still a very good expositor. It’s very clear and forceful. Voltaire is never an obscure writer. It comes out in the early 1740s and has a huge impact across Europe. The reception of Newton in continental Europe is largely on account of Voltaire’s book.

“The reception of Newton in continental Europe is largely on account of Voltaire’s book”

It’s because of this that Voltaire is made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1743, whereas he fails twice to get into the French Academy before he’s finally elected only in 1746. So, his first big academy is the Royal Society on the grounds that he had done all this work to promote Newton. At this point in his career, Voltaire tries to be a Newtonian natural philosopher, but this turns out to be a sort of a heroic failure. The summary of Newton’s thought is clearly a success, but his attempts at original scientific work are not. He just hasn’t got that sort of mind.

With the Newton wars, you could just argue that Fontenelle is wrong, Maupertuis was right, and Voltaire just recognises that the Newtonian theory is right. But, at some level, it’s an institutional struggle. At this stage, it’s like the young turks versus the old guard. Voltaire wants to be seen as being in the new wave. He also has an interest at this point in getting back to Paris and being seen as a ‘scientist’. There’s even a moment in the early 1740s when he angles to become the secretary of the Academy of Sciences.

What J B Shank shows brilliantly is that the way that people came down on the side of either Descartes or Newton was much more to do with who their friends were and which network they were in—whether they were inside or outside of the Academy, for example. It’s a conflict of generations and a conflict of institutions. He shows how the history of ideas is not neutral or transparent but is always tied up with lots of other cultural forces and influences.

That is the conventional Kuhnian line, though, isn’t it?

Yes, absolutely, but curiously enough, this approach had not previously been applied to the scientific debates of the early French Enlightenment. I think this approach makes much more sense and gives you a handle on what’s going on, and it also gives you a much better sense of how Voltaire’s career is (or is not) developing. He’s not naturally a gifted scientist, but after the fiasco of the Lettres philosophiques , he wants to be back in Paris. It’s very hard to be a French writer and not be very well-received in the capital. So, he thinks that science will be a route back.

He’s picking a camp—picking a cause—partly intellectually, but it’s also to do with institutions and identities. It doesn’t entirely work, but he does write the book on Newton which, importantly, gets him into the Royal Society. In the end, he will go back to Paris using a different route. He goes back as a courtier in the 1740s. What J B Shank does is to give a much more nuanced understanding of how Voltaire is trying to make his career in that early period. It’s the most important new insight into Voltaire’s intellectual evolution to come out for the last generation.

Before we move on to the next book, I just want to talk about Émilie du Châtelet and her influence on Voltaire’s scientific thinking. She is an exceptional thinker and deserves far more recognition.

She’s a formidable intellectual from a very high-born aristocratic family. She lives with Voltaire publicly as a couple, while her husband lived in another chateau just accepting the whole thing. The English would say it’s a very French arrangement. But in a way, she did something more scandalous. It wasn’t that Mme du Châtelet lived with a man that she wasn’t married to—it was that she did science!

Her love affair with Voltaire was passionate, at least in the early years, before it settled into more of an arrangement. But it’s quite clear that she taught him science. There was a rather patronising view in the previous generation that Voltaire taught her, but it’s clearly the other way around: she had a much more sophisticated scientific mind than he did. She published a very important book called Foundations of Physics trying to reconcile the different modern theories of physics. Her other huge achievement was translating Newton’s Principia from Latin into French. If you now go into a bookshop in Paris and buy the Principia , her French translation is still the only one in existence. It was, and is, an extraordinary scholarly achievement.

Your fourth book choice is Candide . Can you tell me why you’ve recommended this one?

Well, it’s a bit hard not to, really. While it wasn’t his most famous text in his lifetime, it has become the work for which he is best known now. You could say that Voltaire is a global writer because of Candide ; it has been translated into every possible language, both Western and Eastern. It has a huge resonance and was a bestseller right from the minute it was published in 1759. And it’s been enormously influential. You have Bernstein’s Candide musical, there are endless illustrated editions, and there have been lots of literary sequels and parodies—of which my favourite is Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God , published in 1932 and banned by the Irish Free State.

Candide is a great piece of writing, and it’s the piece of writing that has taken Voltaire’s name absolutely everywhere. We remember him as the writer of these philosophical tales, and it’s with these writings mostly that we teach Voltaire in schools and universities. But it’s true that these contes are some of his most brilliantly funny and accessible texts. It’s a very good way for someone to get into reading Voltaire. I’ve chosen the Roger Pearson translation because I think it’s so lively and sprightly, both for Candide and for the other contes : he knows how to make the text speak to us.

For those that haven’t yet come across Candide , can you give a brief summary of the plot and introduce us to the different interpretations of it?

A young man, Candide, is ejected from a chateau in Germany after seducing the lord’s willing daughter. He staggers from disaster to disaster, confronting the most appalling and implausible events. The disasters he’s confronted with are both man-made (like war) and God-made, like the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon. You’ve got both moral and natural evil. Faced by all of these appalling things, he remembers what he was taught by his philosopher-tutor Pangloss: “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” So, Candide has become a bit like an automaton. He just repeats this in the face of all this appalling evil. Gradually, you just stop believing it. It’s a very interesting question as to whether Candide also stops believing it. Does Candide actually learn or not?

You could say that a lot of eighteenth-century heroes and heroines follow the pattern of a Bildungsroman . There’s a Lockean empirical structure to a lot of eighteenth-century fictions: you start off young and naïve—like Locke’s tabula rasa —and you go through life and face new experiences. Travel is a key theme, obviously, as in Gulliver’s Travels , and the fiction usually explores the way in which the hero or heroine responds to their various trials and tribulations, and matures (or not). The peculiarity of Candide is that we can never be sure if he really is a Lockean or not. Does he actually learn from his experiences? The question at the end of the novel remains: who has learnt anything from all this human suffering?

“Does Candide actually learn from his experiences? The question at the end of the novel remains: who has learnt anything from all this human suffering?”

It’s a more complicated book than it might seem. At certain points, you really ought to wonder what sort of genre you’re reading. It has a subtitle which is “Candide or Optimism”. Optimism is a philosophical position that aims to be a solution to the problem of evil. The problem of evil is as old as the book of Job, and one extraordinarily popular solution in the eighteenth century, often associated with Leibniz, goes as follows: things that you think of as evil appear to you as evil because you only have a partial view of the universe. If you have a god’s eye view of the whole universe, then it fits into a whole pattern that is broadly good—or as good as God can make it.

It’s sad that the dog gets run over, but what you don’t know is that the dog was going to bite someone and give them rabies—so it’s a merciful release that the dog gets run over. But if you start applying that to major human evil, like war or the Holocaust, you realise pretty quickly that it’s a very thin argument. And Voltaire does think it’s a very thin argument. But it is very current in the eighteenth century, popularised notably by Pope in his Essay on Man . That Leibnizian optimism spreads into mainstream European culture through Pope’s poem.

In the wake of the well-known earthquake in Lisbon, Voltaire is questioning how you could make sense of the problem of evil. Often people read Candide as just being about that, but I think, more broadly, it’s about rational and irrational thought—and about how people argue rationally and irrationally. It’s a book that really explores reason and un-reason. It draws the reader into different sorts of arguments. I don’t think it’s only about the problem of evil.

Finally, you have selected Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-Century France by Stephen Bird.

I’ve chosen this book because it’s the first really comprehensive study of the different phases in which Voltaire was reinvented and then celebrated after his death. There’s also a chapter on popular editions of his work and the extent to which Voltaire is read by a broader reading public—a more working class reading public.

There’s Voltaire the writer, who we’ve been talking about, but there’s also Voltairianism. Voltaire has become a shorthand for a certain set of values. Voltaire is absolutely central to the French republican tradition, as he was central to the intellectual construction of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries needed intellectual predecessors and they created Voltaire—with Rousseau, bizarrely—as the great progenitor. It’s Voltaire and Rousseau, far more than Diderot or Montesquieu, who are the two authorities that somehow legitimate the Revolution in the eyes of the revolutionaries themselves.

“There’s Voltaire the writer, but there’s also Voltairianism. Voltaire has become a shorthand for a certain set of values”

There’s no need to make the obvious point that this is not what he would have wanted—Voltaire would clearly have loathed the Revolution. He was a monarchist; he believed in hierarchies and stability . . .

He was anti-fanaticism!

He was fanatically anti-fanaticism. He would have hated the Terror and all of those things. But the fact is that, in the Revolution, Voltaire is reinvented as the intellectual predecessor of the movement. He is the first writer to be interred in the Pantheon in 1791, in one of the great ceremonies of the Revolution. There was a great procession that went through Paris that took two days—the coffin rested on the stones of the ruined Bastille before travelling along the Left Bank of the Seine, in front of the house where he died, and being installed in the Pantheon. Rousseau was also moved to the Pantheon two years later, but Voltaire was the first. He has the aura of the first revolutionary intellectual.

“Voltaire would clearly have loathed the French Revolution”

French politics in the nineteenth century is an incredible rollercoaster of republican and anti-republican sentiment. They try out different republics and then try to go back to the monarchy and then another republic comes along. But at every single political turn, Voltaire is always there as a set of values. Again, it’s not so much what he really said that counts as the way in which contemporaries read him. He wrote so much that, to some extent, you could almost pick from the great corpus the text that most suited your cause. If you want to be anti-church, then you pick the really vicious attacks on Catholicism in the Dictionnaire philosophique . If you want a more comforting Voltaire, you can go to his history of the reign of Louis XIV which is quite pro-monarchy, a paean of praise in favour of the greatness of France.

Voltaire had a position in the culture where, on the one hand, he was seen as the great opponent of Catholicism, but, on the other, he was viewed as the author who gave France its sense of history, even its sense of identity. He explicitly connected the greatness of Louis XIV with the greatness of the writers of that reign. This was also a period of great military conquest, of course—celebrated by Voltaire who, at other times, attacks war. So, there are inconsistencies aplenty, but you can also see how people from different political traditions can find different things in Voltaire to champion. Even if you were a Catholic who didn’t like the religious politics, you probably still saw his plays at the theatre. They remained widely performed up until the end of the nineteenth century, with all the great actresses including Sarah Bernhardt playing the leading roles.

Was Voltaire a type that later literary figures consciously aimed to emulate?

Absolutely! He is the model of the engaged public intellectual for later generations. Victor Hugo is closest thing to a Voltaire of the mid-ninetenth century in terms of his stature, his prolific output, and his campaigning against the death penalty. In 1878, marking the centenary of Voltaire’s death, Hugo makes a remarkable speech reported in all the papers describing the importance of Voltaire. And then, at the end of the 19th century you have the Dreyfus Affair with Émile Zola. In the way that the Dreyfus Affair unfolds, there are clearly echoes of the Calas Affair. Zola sees himself as the successor of Voltaire as the leading public intellectual who is using the press to manipulate public opinion. Nearer our time, Sartre would be another example.

Whether in the nineteenth century or beyond, to what extent is Voltaire a person that people mythologise? I’m just thinking that the most famous quote attributed to Voltaire is found nowhere in his extant writings: “I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I think it’s a question of the difference between being famous and being a celebrity. Fame is one thing. But once you’re a celebrity, somehow the public have a handle on you, they think they own you, and you have to live up to what the public think you should be. So at that point, it’s fine to invent quotations by Voltaire that he never actually said.

There’s a story that at the end of his life in 1778 when he’s dying of cancer, he goes back to Paris—he’s eighty-four—and attends a performance of his last great tragedy Irène at the Comédie-Française. He sits in a box and is applauded by the audience. At the end of the show, his bust is brought on to the stage and the leading actress of the day crowned the bust with laurel. He would die a few days later. It’s reported that when he left the theatre that night, he got into the cab and someone in the street shouted, “That’s Voltaire!”. So, the people in the street chased the cab as it drives away, shouting “L’homme aux Calas! L’homme aux Calas!”

Now, is this true? Who knows? But it is reported seriously by people at the time—so, even if it’s not true, it should be. As he said of God, if he didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent him. It’s the same with the anecdotes about Voltaire. He had become this living legend. The myth is real, whether it’s true or not, and the people chasing the dying man down the street probably hadn’t read much or any Voltaire. But they knew his name. It was a a symbol for something, which then explains why he became this figure in the Revolution. And that attracts all those quotable quotes. It’s also true that Voltaire was brilliant at creating memorable quips— Candide is full of them—and a whole string of them have become proverbial. So it’s only right that we continue inventing his quips.

We’re now living in a time where there is heightened sensitivity to ideas about speech. We’re more alert than ever to the harms that can be perpetuated by our words, but we have to wrestle with this within a framework of basic commitment to free speech. Would reading Voltaire today amplify or benefit the discussion?

It’s a really good question. At one level, one would say that the values of free speech, the use of robust common sense to attack intolerance, seem all too relevant. The idea of examining people’s reasoning and looking at how prejudice creeps into rational discourse, looking at how people distort arguments, or how people sway others with fake emotions—all of that is really quite relevant to fake news and all the interconnected issues that are worrying us now.

On the other hand, it’s interesting to think about hate speech with Voltaire. He does use harsh words and harsh language. The satire is very aggressive sometimes, which can and should make us uneasy. Maybe the answer is that making you uneasy is what satirists do. I would much rather have a Voltaire that unsettles than a Voltaire who is patronised by Roland Barthes as “the last of the happy writers”.

Voltaire’s concern with intellectual modesty is also timely. The dangers resulting from fanaticism are grounded in holding beliefs dogmatically. And, often, the resulting damage can be so disproportionate to the soundness of the beliefs in question. This call for modesty involves subjecting our own views to common sense and accepting they can be misguided. That seems prescient.

And that doesn’t go out of date. It gets often terrifyingly modern. I completely agree. At the end of the article ‘Sensation’ in the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary , Voltaire finishes like this: “What can we conclude from all that? You who can read and think, you conclude.” As a final word, that hasn’t dated.

March 22, 2019

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Nicholas Cronk

Nicholas Cronk is Professor of French Literature and Director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford.  He is general editor of the  Complete Works of Voltaire , the first ever scholarly publication of the totality of Voltaire’s writings, in some 200 volumes. The project was awarded the Hervé Deluen Prize from the Académie française in 2010. He was edited works by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rostand for the Oxford World Classics series.

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Voltaire Foundation

for Enlightenment studies

Who was Voltaire?

François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known as Voltaire, was a writer, philosopher, poet, dramatist,  historian  and polemicist of the French Enlightenment. The diversity of his literary output is rivalled only by its abundance: the edition of his complete works currently nearing completion will comprise over 200 volumes.

‘The age of Voltaire’ has become synonymous with ‘the Enlightenment’, but although Voltaire’s eminence as a  philosophe  is self-evident, the precise originality of his thought and writings is less easily defined. In this section, you can explore the story of his  life ,  works  and  legacy .

School of Life: Voltaire  – philosopher Alain de Botton has created a short  animated video on Voltaire , scripted by Nicholas Cronk: [embedded video]

Born in Paris into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was a brilliant pupil of the Jesuits. His rejection of his father’s attempts to guide him into a career in the law was sealed in 1718, when he invented a new name for himself: ‘de Voltaire’. Voltaire is an anagram of ‘Arouet l(e) j(eune)’ (in the 18th century,  i  and  j , and  u and  v , were typographically interchangeable). The addition of the aristocratic preposition ‘de’ may be an early sign of his social ambition, but the play on the verb  volter , to turn abruptly, evokes a playful or ‘volatile’ quality which fortells the quick style, pervasive humour and irony that make Voltaire such an important figure in the history of the Enlightenment.

In the same year that he coined his new name, Voltaire enjoyed his first major literary success when his tragedy  Œdipe  was staged by the Comédie Française. Meanwhile he was working on an epic poem which had as its protagonist Henri IV, the much-loved French monarch who brought France’s civil wars to a close, and who, in Voltaire’s treatment, becomes a forerunner of religious toleration:  La Ligue  (later enlarged to become  La Henriade ) was first published in 1723.

VOLTAIRE IN ENGLAND

His reputation as a poet and dramatist was now comfortably established, and he decided to travel to England to oversee the publishing of the definitive edition of  La Henriade . His departure for London was precipitated when he unwisely became involved in a humiliating argument with an aristocrat, who had him briefly interned in the Bastille.

Voltaire arrived in London in the autumn of 1726, and what had begun partly as self-imposed exile became a crucially formative period for him. He learned English and mixed with a number of figures prominent in England’s political and cultural life. An old saw has it that Voltaire ‘came to England a poet and left it a philosopher’. In truth, he was a philosopher before coming to England, and it would be more accurate to say that Voltaire came to England a poet and left it a prose writer. Voltaire thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and during his long life he would never abandon the writing of verse, for which he had a remarkable facility (many of his letters are sprinkled with seemingly spontaneous passages of verse). In England, however, he came into contact with models of prose unlike those to which he was accustomed in France: Swift’s  Gulliver’s Travels , for example, which Voltaire read on first publication, or Addison’s Spectator , a periodical he used in order to learn to read English. It is hardly coincidental, therefore, that before returning to France in 1728, Voltaire began writing his first two major essays in prose: a history, the  Histoire de Charles XII , and a book about the English, which is now best known under the title  Lettres philosophiques , but was first published in English translation (London 1733) as the  Letters Concerning the English Nation .

CIREY AND BERLIN

The furore created by the publication in France in 1734 of the  Lettres philosophiques  led Voltaire to leave Paris and take refuge in the château of his mistress, Mme du Châtelet, at Cirey-en-Champagne. From 1734 until Mme du Châtelet’s death in 1749, this was his haven from the world. During this period, he studied and wrote intensively in a wide variety of areas, including science ( Eléments de la philosophie de Newton , 1738), poetry ( Le Mondain , 1736), drama ( Mahomet , 1741), and fiction ( Zadig , 1747). In the 1740s, Voltaire was briefly on better terms with the court: he was made royal historiographer in 1745, and the following year, after several failed attempts, he was finally elected to the Académie Française. He had turned fifty and was now the leading poet and dramatist of his day; perhaps even Voltaire did not imagine that the works which would make him even more celebrated still lay in the future.

An initially idyllic interlude was provided by Voltaire’s stay at the court of Potsdam (1750-1753), and in 1752 he published both  Le Siècle de Louis XIV  and  Micromégas . Throughout his career, however, Voltaire was prone to involvement in literary quarrels, and his time in Berlin was no exception; his attack on Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy, caused Frederick II to lose patience with him. Voltaire left Berlin in a flurry of mutual recriminations, and although these were later forgotten, Voltaire’s dream of having found the ideal enlightened monarch were definitively shattered. His correspondence with Frederick, which had begun in 1736 when the latter was still crown prince, survived, and, after a hiatus, it continued until Voltaire’s death. They corresponded on literary and philosophical matters, and Voltaire sent Frederick many of his works in manuscript. Their exchange of more than seven hundred letters remains as an extraordinary literary achievement in its own right.

GENEVA AND FERNEY

In January 1755, after a period of wandering, Voltaire acquired a property in Geneva which he called ‘Les Délices’. A new and more settled phase now began as, at the age of sixty-one, he became master of his own house for the first time: in a letter of March that year, he wrote that ‘I am finally leading the life of a patriarch’. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 may have disturbed his philosophical certainties and caused him to doubt the Leibnizian Optimism which Alexander Pope had helped to popularize, but it did not disturb his new-found personal happiness. His  Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne  appeared within weeks of the earthquake, and it is revealing that his instant literary response should have been in verse. His prose response to the catastrophe, in  Candide , took longer to mature and was published in 1759. In the meantime, he had written articles for the  Encyclopédie  of Diderot and d’Alembert, and in 1756 he published his universal history, the  Essai sur les mœurs .

In 1757, d’Alembert’s critical article ‘Genève’ in the  Encyclopédie  had provoked a scandal in that city. Geneva turned out not to be the model republic that Voltaire had imagined or hoped it was, and after a number of tussles with clerical authority, he resolved to leave the city. A return to Paris would not have been welcomed by the government, so he purchased a house and estate at Ferney, where he installed himself in 1760 – on French soil now, but within striking distance of the border. It was in this symbolically marginal position that Voltaire was to live for the rest of his life. Henceforth he would play the part of the seigneur , caring for his estate and even building a church for the villagers: it bears the deist (and immodest) inscription  Deo erexit Voltaire  (‘Voltaire erected [this] to God’). But this new-found role did not mean that, like Candide, Voltaire had found happiness in cultivating his garden and in ignoring the world beyond. On the contrary, it was in 1760 that Voltaire first issued the rallying cry with which he would henceforth sign many of his letters:  Ecrasons l’Infâme  (‘Let’s crush the infamous’). The stability of his base at Ferney seems to have given Voltaire the opportunity over the following years to launch and encourage the campaigns which soon made him the most famous writer in Europe.

The Calas affair was a defining moment in this crusade for tolerance. The Huguenot Jean Calas was tortured and broken on the wheel in 1762 after being found guilty, on the basis of dubious evidence, of murdering his son. Voltaire successfully led a determined campaign to clear Calas’s name, writing many letters and publishing a number of works, including  Traité sur la tolérance  (1763). Other campaigns followed – a successful one to obtain the rehabilitation of another Huguenot family, the Sirvens, accused of having murdered a daughter recently converted to Catholicism, and an unsuccessful one to achieve a pardon for a nineteen-year-old man, La Barre, condemned to be burned at the stake for having committed certain trivial acts of sacrilege (and for having in his possession a copy of Voltaire’s  Dictionnaire philosophique ). These struggles brought Voltaire to even greater public prominence, and it in no way diminishes his undoubted determination and courage to say that he obviously relished his new role: in a letter of 1766, he wrote to a friend ‘Oh how I love this philosophy of action and goodwill’.

Although many of Voltaire’s later writings concerned his crusade for tolerance and justice, he continued, to write in a wide variety of forms, from tragedy to biblical criticism, and from satire to short fiction ( L’Ingénu , 1767;  Le Taureau blanc , 1773). In February 1778, Voltaire was persuaded by his friends to make a symbolic return to Paris, ostensibly to oversee preparations to stage his latest tragedy,  Irène . It was the first time he had set foot in the capital since 1750, and he was received in triumph. A succession of friends called on him, and despite his deteriorating health, he attended a performance of his new play at the Comédie Française, in the course of which his bust was crowned on stage with a laurel wreath. His health did not permit his return to Ferney, and he died in Paris two months later. Even in death, Voltaire, a celebrated amateur actor, seemed to have stage-managed his departure from the scene so as to gain maximum publicity.

Voltaire and the Enlightenment

In terms of the history of ideas, Voltaire’s single most important achievement was to have helped in the 1730s to introduce the thought of Newton and Locke to France (and so to the rest of the Continent). This achievement is, as Jonathan Israel has recently shown, hardly as radical as has sometimes been thought: the English thinkers in question served essentially as a deistic bulwark against the more radical (atheistic) currents of thought in the Spinozist tradition. Voltaire’s deist beliefs, reiterated throughout his life, came to appear increasingly outmoded and defensive as he grew older and as he became more and more exercised by the spread of atheism. Voltaire’s failure to produce an original philosophy was, in a sense, counterbalanced by his deliberate cultivation of a philosophy of action; his ‘common sense’ crusade against superstition and prejudice and in favour of religious toleration was his single greatest contribution to the progress of Enlightenment. ‘Rousseau writes for writing’s sake’, he declared in a letter of 1767, ‘I write to act.’

It was therefore Voltaire’s literary and rhetorical contributions to the Enlightenment which were truly unique. Interested neither in music (like Rousseau) nor in art (like Diderot), Voltaire was fundamentally a man of language. Through force of style, through skilful choice of literary genre, and through the accomplished manipulation of the book market, he found means of popularizing and promulgating ideas which until then had generally been clandestine. The range of his writing is immense, embracing virtually every genre. In verse, he wrote in every form – epic poetry, ode, satire and epistle, and even occasional and light verse; his drama, also written in verse, includes both comedies and tragedies (although the tragedies have not survived in the modern theatre, many live on in the opera, as, for example, Rossini’s  Semiramide  and  Tancredi ).

It is above all the prose works with which modern readers are familiar, and again the writings cover a wide spectrum: histories, polemical satires, pamphlets of all types, dialogues, short fictions or  contes , and letters both real and fictive. The conspicuous absentee from this list is the novel, a genre which, like the prose  drame , Voltaire thought base and trivial. To understand the strength of his dislike for these ‘new’ genres, we need to remember that Voltaire was a product of the late seventeenth century, the moment of the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, and this literary debate continued to influence his aesthetic views all through his life. Controversial religious and political views were often expressed in the literary forms (classical tragedy, the verse satire) perfected in the seventeenth century; the ‘conservatism’ of these forms seems, to modern readers at least, to compromise the content, though this apparent traditionalism may in fact have helped Voltaire mask the originality of his enterprise: it is at least arguable that in a work such as  Zaïre  (1732), the form of the classical tragedy made its ideas of religious toleration more palatable.

Yet this would also be a simplification, for notwithstanding his apparent literary conservatism, Voltaire was in fact a relentless reformer and experimenter with literary genres, innovative almost despite himself, particularly in the domain of prose. Although he never turned his back on verse drama and philosophical poetry, he experimented with different forms of historical writing and tried his hand at different styles of prose fiction. Above all, he seems to have discovered late in his career the satirical and polemical uses of the fragment, notably in his alphabetic works, the  Dictionnaire philosophique portatif  (1764), containing 73 articles in its first edition, and the  Questions sur l’Encyclopédie  (1770-1772). The latter work, whose first edition contained 423 articles in nine octavo volumes, is a vast and challenging compendium of his thought and ranks among Voltaire’s unrecognized masterpieces. When he died, Voltaire was working on what would have been his third ‘philosophical’ dictionary,  L’Opinion en alphabet .

Voltaire’s ironic, fast-moving, deceptively simple style makes him one of the greatest stylists of the French language. All his life, Voltaire loved to act in his own plays, and this fondness for role-playing carried through into all his writings. He used something like 175 different pseudonyms in the course of his career, and his writing is characterized by a proliferation of different personae and voices. The reader is constantly drawn into dialogue – by a footnote which contradicts the text, or by one voice in the text which argues against another. The use of the mask is so relentless and the presence of humour, irony, and satire so pervasive that the reader has finally no idea of where the ‘real’ Voltaire is. His autobiographical writings are few and entirely unrevealing: as the title of his  Commentaire historique sur les Œuvres de l’auteur de la Henriade  suggests, it is his writings alone which constitute their author’s identity.

In fact we rarely know with certainty what Voltaire truly thought or believed; what mattered to him was the impact of what he wrote. The great crusades of the 1760s taught him to appreciate the importance of public opinion, and in popularizing the clandestine ideas of the early part of the century he played the role of the journalist. He may have been old-fashioned in his nostalgia for the classicism of the previous century, but he was wholly of his day in his consummate understanding of the medium of publishing. He manipulated the book trade to achieve maximum publicity for his ideas, and he well understood the importance of what he called ‘the portable’. In 1766, Voltaire wrote to d’Alembert: ‘Twenty in-folio volumes will never cause a revolution; it’s the little portable books at thirty  sous  which are to be feared.’

Voltaire was also modern in the way he invented himself by fashioning a public image out of his adopted name. As the patriarch of Ferney, he turned himself into an institution whose fame reached across Europe. As an engaged and militant intellectual, he stood at the beginning of a French tradition which looked forward to Emile Zola and to Jean-Paul Sartre, and in modern republican France his name stands as a cultural icon, a symbol of rationalism and the defence of tolerance. Voltaire was a man of paradoxes: the bourgeois who as  de  Voltaire gave himself aristocratic pretensions, but who as plain Voltaire later became a hero of the Revolution; the conservative in aesthetic matters who appeared as a radical in religious and political issues. He was, above all, the master ironist, who, perhaps more than any other writer, gave to the Enlightenment its characteristic and defining tone of voice.

– N. E. Cronk

It has been estimated that, in a career which stretched over sixty years, Voltaire’s extant writings ran to some fifteen million words: everything concerning the  Œuvre  seems larger than life, and it is hard to make any simple assessment of it. ‘Complete’ editions appeared in Voltaire’s lifetime; the last, published by Cramer in Geneva in 1775, ran to forty volumes (the so-called  édition encadrée ). The first complete edition of Voltaire’s writings after his death, known as the Kehl edition, was published on the eve of the Revolution (1785-1789) in seventy octavo volumes (there was also a duodecimo edition in ninety-two volumes). Many complete editions followed in the nineteenth century, culminating in the Moland edition (1877-1883) in fifty-two volumes, which remains – pending the completion of the  Oxford edition  – the standard edition of reference.

Theodore Besterman’s ‘definitive’ edition of Voltaire’s correspondence (1968-1977) includes more than 15,000 letters, but these surviving letters must represent only a fraction of the total number written by Voltaire in his lifetime, probably in excess of 40,000. This edition is part of the larger  Complete Works of Voltaire , a complete and critical edition of all Voltaire’s writings currently being published by the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford; when complete, it will exceed two hundred volumes.

The list  How to quote Voltaire  gives the best available edition for each text that Voltaire wrote. A reliable, searchable version of his works is available on-line on  TOUT VOLTAIRE .