Voltaire

Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, a French writer who became the most famous intellectual of the eighteenth century and, for many, the embodiment of the Enlightenment. A poet, playwright, historian, novelist and tireless pamphleteer, he campaigned against religious intolerance, the power of the Catholic Church and arbitrary justice, and spread the science of Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke across continental Europe. He is best remembered today for the satirical tale Candide.

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris on 21 November 1694, the son of a prosperous notary and official, in the last decades of the reign of Louis XIV. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he received a thorough classical training. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but he was determined to write, and he quickly made a name in the witty, freethinking society of the Regency that followed Louis XIV's death in 1715.

His sharp tongue repeatedly got him into trouble. Verses attributed to him accusing the regent, the Duke of Orléans, of incest with his daughter led to eleven months in the Bastille in 1717–1718. On his release he took the name Voltaire, whose origin is uncertain; it may be an anagram of a Latinised form of Arouet. His tragedy Oedipe was a triumph at the Comédie-Française in 1718 and made him the leading dramatist of his generation, while shrewd investments laid the foundations of a large personal fortune.

In 1726 a quarrel with the aristocrat the Chevalier de Rohan, who had Voltaire beaten by his servants, ended with Voltaire, not Rohan, back in the Bastille. He was released on condition that he leave France and spent more than two years in England, mostly around London. He learned English, met writers such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, attended Newton's funeral in 1727 and came to admire the country's relative religious toleration, freedom of the press and respect for men of letters and trade.

The result was the Philosophical Letters, or Letters on the English, published in 1733 in English and in 1734 in French. Using England as a mirror, it praised Quakers and other dissenters, Locke's account of the mind, Newton's physics, smallpox inoculation and the power of Parliament, and implicitly condemned the French church and state. The book was condemned by the Parlement of Paris and burned, and Voltaire had to flee the capital.

For most of the next fifteen years Voltaire lived at Cirey, in eastern France, the château of his lover Émilie du Châtelet, a gifted mathematician who later translated Newton's Principia into French. Together they built a library and laboratory, and Voltaire's Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738) did much to win French readers over from the physics of René Descartes to Newton's. He continued to write plays, poems and histories, including The Age of Louis XIV (1751), one of the first histories to concentrate on a society's culture, arts and manners rather than on kings and battles alone.

After du Châtelet's death in 1749, Voltaire accepted the long-standing invitation of Frederick the Great and moved to Prussia in 1750, living at the court in Potsdam and Berlin. The friendship between the philosopher and the king soured amid quarrels, and when Voltaire left in 1753 he was detained for several weeks at Frankfurt by Frederick's agents. Barred from Paris, he settled in 1755 near Geneva, at a house he called Les Délices.

In 1759 Voltaire bought an estate at Ferney, just inside France near the Swiss border, so that he could slip across to safety if either government moved against him. He lived there for almost twenty years, running the estate and a watchmaking business, and receiving visitors from all over Europe, who called him the patriarch of Ferney. These were his most productive years as a campaigner. He wrote thousands of letters, many to Catherine the Great, Frederick and the philosophes of Paris, and adopted the slogan "écrasez l'infâme", "crush the infamous thing", by which he meant religious fanaticism and the persecuting church.

Candide (1759) mocked the optimistic philosophy associated with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, by putting its naïve hero through war, earthquake, shipwreck and the Inquisition. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which had already inspired a bitter poem from Voltaire, lay behind it. The book ends with the famously ambiguous advice to cultivate one's garden.

His most celebrated campaign concerned Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse who was tortured and executed in 1762 for supposedly murdering his son to stop him converting to Catholicism. Voltaire became convinced that Calas was innocent and the victim of religious prejudice, published the Treatise on Tolerance (1763) and mobilised opinion until the verdict was overturned in 1765. He took up other cases, including that of the young Chevalier de La Barre, executed in 1766 for alleged blasphemy. His Philosophical Dictionary (1764), a pocket-sized collection of short, ironic articles, was burned in several countries.

Voltaire was not a system-builder, and he distrusted metaphysics, preferring the empirical science of Newton and Locke. He was a deist: he believed that the order of nature showed the existence of a supreme designer, whom he once compared to a clockmaker, but rejected revealed religion, miracles and clerical authority, while thinking that belief in a God who rewards and punishes was socially useful. He championed freedom of thought and expression and religious toleration, though not democracy; he hoped for reform from enlightened monarchs and educated elites. He was a fierce critic of torture and of the abuses of French justice, and an admirer of commerce as a force for peace. His writings also contain hostile, sometimes vicious, remarks about Jews and stereotypes about other peoples, which historians continue to discuss.

In February 1778, aged 83, Voltaire returned to Paris for the first time in nearly three decades to see his last tragedy, Irène, performed, and was greeted with extraordinary public acclaim. He died there on 30 May 1778. Refused a Christian burial in Paris, his body was secretly taken to an abbey in Champagne. In July 1791, during the French Revolution, it was carried in a huge procession to the Panthéon.

Voltaire's collected works and letters fill well over a hundred volumes, and his correspondence alone includes more than 20,000 letters. Many of his plays and epic poems, admired in his time, are now little read, but Candide and his campaigns for tolerance have kept his name alive. Along with Montesquieu, Denis Diderot and his great rival Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he stands at the heart of the Enlightenment, and his name remains shorthand for the defence of free expression against censorship and fanaticism.