Voltaire
"This is no time to make new enemies." Those words are attributed to Voltaire on his deathbed, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan. The man who said them, born Francois-Marie Arouet in Paris on the 21st of November 1694, had spent more than eight decades making enemies of kings, bishops, and censors. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. He used at least 178 separate pen names. He was twice sentenced to prison and once exiled, and his books were publicly burned. Yet by the time he died on the 30th of May 1778, he was treated as a returning hero. How did a lawyer's son nicknamed "Zozo" become the writer Victor Hugo would call the man whose name characterizes an entire century? What did he believe, and why did it terrify those in power? And how did a phrase he never actually wrote become the line he is most often quoted for?
Arouet adopted the name Voltaire in 1718, the year he walked out of the Bastille. He had spent eleven months imprisoned there over a satirical verse accusing the Regent of incest with his daughter. The origin of the new name is unclear. It is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname joined to the initial letters of le jeune, meaning the young. A family tradition held that as a child he was called le petit volontaire, a determined little thing, and the name also reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family's home town in the Poitou region. Richard Holmes notes that a writer like Voltaire would have wanted it to suggest speed and daring, echoing words such as voltige, the acrobatics of a trapeze, and volte-face, a spinning about to face one's enemies. The old name carried ugly resonances, sounding close to a rouer, to be beaten up, and roue, a debauchee. In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire explained that he had been so unhappy under the name of Arouet that he took another, chiefly to stop being confused with the poet Roi. That confusion would prove the least of the dangers his pen invited.
On the 2nd of May 1726, Voltaire was escorted from the Bastille to Calais and put on a boat to England. The cause was a quarrel with Guy Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, who had taunted him over his name change. When Voltaire retorted that his own name would win the world's esteem, the powerful Rohan family had him beaten by servants and then imprisoned without trial. He asked for exile as an alternative to indefinite jail. In England he lived largely in Wandsworth and lodged for a time above a barber's shop at 10 Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, near his British publisher, the Huguenot printer Peter Vaillant. He took an English tutor, a Quaker named Edward Higginson, and his fascination with the Quakers helped create the figure of the Good Quaker as a paragon of virtue in French Enlightenment writing. Voltaire moved through English high society, meeting Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and he may have attended the funeral of Isaac Newton. Britain's constitutional monarchy struck him sharply against French absolutism, as did its broader freedom of speech and religion. When he published his admiring observations as Lettres philosophiques in Rouen in 1734, the book was publicly burned and banned, and he was again forced to flee Paris.
In 1733, Voltaire met Emilie du Chatelet, a mathematician and married mother of three who was twelve years his junior. Their affair lasted sixteen years. To escape arrest after the Lettres philosophiques scandal, he took refuge at her husband's chateau at Cirey, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, paying for the building's renovation while her husband sometimes stayed there alongside his wife and her lover. Together the pair gathered around 21,000 books and ran scientific experiments, including an attempt to determine the nature of fire and experiments in optics. Voltaire was a committed Newtonian. He helped spread the famous story of Newton's inspiration from a falling apple, which he had learned from Newton's niece in London. His book Elements of the Philosophy of Newton made the scientist accessible to a far wider public, and du Chatelet translated Newton's Latin Principia into French, a version that remained definitive into the 21st century. The two also analyzed the Bible and concluded that much of its content was dubious. From these years came his belief in separation of church and state. By 1744 Voltaire found life at the chateau confining, and on a visit to Paris he formed a new attachment to his niece, Marie Louise Mignot, who would remain with him until his death.
In August 1736, Frederick the Great, then Crown Prince of Prussia and an admirer, began a correspondence with Voltaire that would last for decades. After du Chatelet died in childbirth in September 1749, Voltaire moved in 1750 to Potsdam at Frederick's invitation. The king made him a chamberlain, appointed him to the Order of Merit, and gave him a salary of 20,000 French livres a year, with rooms at Sanssouci. At first life went well, and in 1751 Voltaire completed Micromegas, a piece of science fiction in which ambassadors from another planet witness the follies of humankind. The relationship soured after Voltaire was accused of theft and forgery by a financier, Abraham Hirschel. A bitter argument with Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy of Science, produced Voltaire's Diatribe du docteur Akakia, which so angered Frederick that he ordered every copy burned. Voltaire left in March 1752, but his troubles were not over. At Frankfurt he was detained for over three weeks by Frederick's agents over a satirical book of poetry the king wanted returned. His luggage was ransacked and valuables taken. Though the two never met again in person, after the Seven Years' War they largely reconciled, and on the 12th of May 1760 Frederick wrote that a single Frenchman had united all the merits of the ancient poets and historians in himself.
"Ecrasez l'infame," crush the infamous, became the rallying cry that runs through Voltaire's private letters. The phrase pointed at abuses of power by royal and religious authorities and at the superstition and intolerance he blamed on the clergy. From 1762, as an unmatched intellectual celebrity living at Ferney, he turned this conviction into action. The Huguenot merchant Jean Calas had been tortured to death in 1763, supposedly for murdering his son to stop a conversion to Catholicism. His possessions were confiscated and his daughters forced into convents. Voltaire, seeing plain religious persecution, managed to overturn the conviction in 1765. In 1764 he secured the release of Claude Chamont, arrested for attending Protestant services, and when the Comte de Lally was executed for treason in 1766, Voltaire wrote a 300-page document in his defense. His weapon against this cruelty was often the pen rather than the petition. His Traite sur la tolerance exposed the Calas affair, and his Dictionnaire philosophique attacked dogmas through articles on subjects such as Abraham and Genesis. He summed up his reasoning in a saying that would outlive him: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Candide, ou l'Optimisme appeared early in 1759 and remains Voltaire's best-known work. The novella mocks the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz through the character Pangloss, whose refrain insists that because God created it, this is of necessity the best of all possible worlds. The book was burned, and Voltaire jokingly attributed it to a certain Demad. It carries one of his sharpest passages on slavery, when the hero meets a mutilated slave in French Guiana and learns at what price Europeans eat sugar. Voltaire wrote in many forms beyond fiction. He produced two book-length epic poems, including the Henriade, written in imitation of Virgil, which ran to sixty-five editions and turned Henry IV into a national hero for his Edict of Nantes. As a historian he broke from narrating only diplomacy and warfare, emphasizing customs, social history, and the arts in works such as The Age of Louis XIV and the Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations. Yale professor Peter Gay credited him with writing very good history, praising his careful sifting of evidence and his grasp that a whole civilization is a unit of study. Candide itself ends with a quieter conclusion than its early satire: it is up to us to cultivate our garden.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The most cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. The words were written in 1906 by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre, in her book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall meant to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude toward Claude Adrien Helvetius and his banned book De l'esprit, but her first-person phrasing was mistaken for a real quotation. Her line may have been inspired by a 1770 letter to an Abbot le Riche, in which Voltaire was reported to have said he detested what the man wrote but would give his life to let him keep writing. Voltaire returned to Paris in February 1778 for the first time in over 25 years, partly to see the opening of his tragedy Irene. The five-day journey exhausted the 83-year-old, and on the 28th of February he believed he was dying, writing that he died adoring God, loving his friends, not hating his enemies, and detesting superstition. Denied a Christian burial in Paris, he was buried secretly in Champagne. On the 11th of July 1791, the National Assembly, regarding him as a forerunner of the French Revolution, had his remains enshrined in the Pantheon. An estimated million people attended the procession that stretched throughout Paris.
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Common questions
Who was Voltaire and what was his real name?
Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, satirist, and historian born Francois-Marie Arouet in Paris on the 21st of November 1694. He adopted the pen name Voltaire in 1718 following his imprisonment in the Bastille, and he is known to have used at least 178 separate pen names in his life.
What is Voltaire's most famous book Candide about?
Candide, ou l'Optimisme, published early in 1759, is Voltaire's best-known work. The novella satirizes Gottfried Leibniz's philosophy through the character Pangloss, who repeats that this is of necessity the best of all possible worlds. It also contains a sharp passage on slavery and ends with the conclusion that it is up to us to cultivate our garden.
Why was Voltaire exiled to England?
Voltaire was exiled to England after a quarrel with Guy Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, whose servants beat him and whose family had him imprisoned without trial in the Bastille. He asked for exile as an alternative punishment and was escorted to Calais on the 2nd of May 1726. Britain's constitutional monarchy and its greater freedom of speech and religion deeply influenced his thinking.
Did Voltaire really say I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it?
No, that quotation is apocryphal. The words were written in 1906 by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre, in her book The Friends of Voltaire, as a summary of Voltaire's attitude toward Claude Adrien Helvetius. Her first-person phrasing was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire.
What did Voltaire do for Jean Calas?
Voltaire campaigned to clear Jean Calas, a Huguenot merchant tortured to death in 1763 over the supposed murder of his son. Seeing it as religious persecution, Voltaire managed to overturn the conviction in 1765. He also defended other persecuted individuals, including Claude Chamont and the Comte de Lally.
How and when did Voltaire die?
Voltaire died on the 30th of May 1778, having returned to Paris that February for the first time in over 25 years to see his tragedy Irene. Denied a Christian burial in Paris, he was buried secretly in Champagne. On the 11th of July 1791 the National Assembly had his remains enshrined in the Pantheon before an estimated million people.
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