Voltaire

Their life

François-Marie Arouet, who took the name Voltaire, was the most famous writer in Europe for most of his eighty-three years — poet, playwright, historian, satirist, and the author of some twenty thousand letters. Imprisoned in the Bastille at twenty-three for verses mocking the regent and exiled to England at thirty-one, he returned with a conviction that outlived him: that cruelty thrives on unexamined authority, and that ridicule is a weapon against it. In old age he became something new — a private citizen who took up the cause of men destroyed by the courts, and won.

Known for

• Candide
• Treatise on Tolerance
• Defending Jean Calas
• Letters on the English
• Philosophical Dictionary
• Satire against persecution

The road they walked

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary who handled the money of the nobility. The Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand gave him a classical education and a taste for the theater, and he gave up the law his father wanted for him to write verse. By his twenties he was a rising wit in Parisian society. In 1717 he was sent to the Bastille for nearly a year, suspected of writing satirical verses against the Regent; his tragedy Oedipus, staged in 1718, made him famous, and it was around then that he began signing himself Voltaire, a name whose origin is still debated.

In 1726 a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman who had him beaten by hired men, ended with Voltaire in the Bastille again and then in exile. He spent about three years in England, where he learned the language, read Locke and Newton, and watched a country with a freer press and a parliament that limited its king. The Letters Concerning the English Nation, published in 1733-34 and soon condemned in France, held England up as a quiet rebuke to home. Years followed with his companion Émilie du Châtelet, the mathematician and translator of Newton, at her château at Cirey, where he wrote plays, histories, and scientific essays. Later came a stay at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, which ended in a bitter falling-out.

From 1758 he lived at Ferney, just over the French border near Geneva, where he could write freely and slip away if the authorities objected. There he produced Candide (1759) and the Treatise on Tolerance (1763), and became a kind of one-man court of appeal. In the Calas affair, he campaigned to clear the name of a Protestant merchant from Toulouse who had been broken on the wheel in 1762 for the supposed murder of his son. The verdict was overturned in 1765. He took up other cases too, including those of Sirven and the Chevalier de La Barre. His rallying cry against religious persecution, often rendered as écrasez l'infâme, became a motto of the Enlightenment.

How their story ended

Voltaire returned to Paris in February 1778, after some twenty-eight years away, to see his tragedy Irène staged and was greeted as a hero by crowds and the Académie. The journey and the excitement wore him out, and he died there on 30 May 1778, aged 83. The Church refused him burial in Paris, so friends carried his body to an abbey in Champagne, where it was interred. In 1791 the Revolution brought his remains back to Paris and placed them in the Panthéon. Accounts of his last days, including whether he made a deathbed profession of faith, were disputed by admirers and opponents alike.

In their words

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Tables where Voltaire sits

The Pamphleteers

For the argument that must move people now — persuasion as action.

Voices of the Enlightenment

For reason, liberty, and thinking for yourself.

From the Journal