Voltaire (1694 - 1778) was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, a French writer, historian, and philosopher who became the most visible figure of the European Enlightenment. [1] He produced plays, poetry, histories, essays, philosophical tales, and a vast correspondence, using satire and public advocacy against religious persecution, censorship, and judicial abuse. [2] His short novel Candide (1759) remains among the most widely read works of eighteenth-century literature. [3]
Early life and first successes
François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris on 21 November 1694 into a prosperous middle-class family and educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he received a thorough classical training. His father intended him for the law, but he committed himself to literature. [1]
Verses satirising the regent Philippe d'Orléans led to eleven months' imprisonment in the Bastille in 1717. He emerged with the tragedy Œdipe, which established him as a dramatist, and with the name Voltaire, which he used thereafter. A quarrel with a nobleman a few years later brought a beating, a second brief imprisonment, and exile to England. [2]
England and the philosophical writings
Voltaire spent roughly three years in England, where he studied its constitutional arrangements, religious pluralism, and intellectual life, and encountered the work of Newton and Locke. The result was the Lettres philosophiques (1734), which praised English liberties by implicit contrast with France. The book was condemned and publicly burned, forcing him to leave Paris. [1]
He settled for some fifteen years at Cirey in Champagne with Émilie du Châtelet, a mathematician and physicist with whom he studied Newtonian science. During this period he wrote extensively on history, producing Le Siècle de Louis XIV and the Essai sur les mœurs, works that treated culture, commerce, and social custom rather than dynastic narrative alone. [2]
Candide and the campaigns
After a disappointing period at the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia, Voltaire settled near Geneva and then, from 1759, at Ferney on the French side of the frontier, where he lived for the rest of his life. Candide, published that year, follows an innocent hero through a catalogue of disasters in a sustained attack on facile philosophical optimism, closing with the injunction to cultivate one's garden. [3]
From Ferney he conducted a vast correspondence and intervened in public affairs. His campaign to clear the name of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant tortured and executed at Toulouse in 1762 on a charge of murdering his son, ended with the verdict overturned and became a landmark in the history of judicial reform. Further campaigns on behalf of other victims followed, alongside the Dictionnaire philosophique and a stream of pamphlets against religious fanaticism. [2]
Death and legacy
Voltaire returned to Paris in 1778 after nearly three decades away, was received with acclaim, and died there on 30 May of that year. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon in 1791 during the French Revolution. [1]
Voltaire's reputation rests less on a systematic philosophy than on the force with which he argued for tolerance, civil liberty, and freedom of expression, and on the literary skill that carried those arguments to a wide readership. The often-quoted formulation defending an opponent's right to speak was written by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of his outlook rather than by Voltaire himself. His collected works and correspondence, running to many volumes, remain a principal source for the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. [4]
