Voltaire

About this figure

Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet in Paris on 21 November 1694 and known by that pen name for most of his life, did more than almost any other writer of his century to turn wit into a public weapon against religious and political authority. Educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, he set out as a poet and playwright and won early fame with the tragedy Œdipe and the epic poem La Henriade. His sharp tongue cost him: satirical verse landed him briefly in the Bastille in 1717, and a bruising quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan in 1726 pushed him into an English exile that reshaped his thinking. In London he encountered Newtonian physics, Locke's philosophy, and a constitutional monarchy that tolerated religious dissent far more openly than France did. The resulting book, Letters on England, praised English institutions so pointedly by comparison that French authorities had it burned when it appeared in 1733–34.

For much of the following decade he lived at Cirey with Émilie du Châtelet, the mathematician and physicist who became his companion and intellectual collaborator and who did much to bring Newton's ideas into French science. Restless and drawn to powerful patrons, he later spent several years at the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia, a relationship that ended badly. From 1759 he settled at Ferney, near the Swiss border, close enough to provoke the French state and far enough to stay out of its reach, receiving a steady stream of visitors and correspondents from across Europe.

His fiction is best remembered through Candide (1759), a brisk, savage tale written in the shadow of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that mocked the philosophical optimism insisting this was "the best of all possible worlds." He wrote a number of shorter contes in the same vein, collected in English as Voltaire's Romances, applying the same ironic method to different settings and follies. He also devoted real effort to the cause of religious toleration: his Treatise on Tolerance grew directly out of his campaign on behalf of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant in Toulouse tortured and executed in 1762 on what was almost certainly a false charge of murdering his own son; Voltaire's public advocacy helped bring about a posthumous reversal of the conviction. His Philosophical Dictionary, assembled over years from articles he had written for reference works and from his own notes, carried the same argumentative energy into short, alphabetized entries on subjects from miracles to torture, mixing scholarship with polemic aimed squarely at clerical power.

He returned to Paris in 1778 for the premiere of his final tragedy, Irène, and was met with an outpouring of public acclaim; he died in the city weeks later, on 30 May 1778, at eighty-three. Because of his long conflict with the Church over his writings, he was denied a Catholic burial in Paris at the time of his death; his remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1791, after the Revolution he did not live to see but had done much to prepare the ground for.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.