A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: François-Marie Arouet, better known by the pen name Voltaire, was born on November 21, 1694 in Paris from a noble family of Poitou province. He was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform despite strict censorship laws and harsh penalties for those who broke them. A satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize Catholic Church dogma and the French institutions of his day. Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with John Locke and Thomas Hobbes ) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions. Compared to Rousseau's (1712-1778) rebelliousness and idealism, Voltaire's world view was more skeptical. He was the last of five children of François Arouet (1650–January 1, 1722), a notary who was a minor treasury official, and his wife, Marie Marguerite d'Aumart (ca. 1660–July 13, 1701). Voltaire was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704-11). He learned Latin and Greek and later in life he became fluent in Italian, Spanish and English. From 1711 to 1713 he studied law and then worked as a secretary to the French ambassador in Holland before devoting himself entirely to writing. He energetically attacked the government and the Catholic Church, which earned him numerous imprisonments and exiles.v In 1716 he was arrested and exiled from Paris for five months. Because of insults to the regent, Philippe II d’Orléans, wrongly ascribed to him, Voltaire was sent to the Bastille (1717) for 11 months. There he rewrote his first tragedy, Œdipe (1718), and began an epic poem on Henry IV, the Henriade.During this time he started to use the name Voltaire. The play brought him fame but also more enemies at court. He acquired an independent fortune through speculation; he was often noted for his generosity but also displayed a shrewd business acumen throughout his life and became a millionaire. At his 1726 stay at the Bastille Voltaire was visited by a flow of admirers. Between 1726 and 1729 he lived in exile mainly in England. He was impressed by the greater freedom of thought in England and deeply influenced by Newton and Locke. Voltaire’s Letters concerning the English Nation (1733), which appeared (1734) in French as Lettres philosophiques, may be said to have initiated the vogue of English philosophy and science that characterized the literature of the Enlightenment. The book was formally banned in France, and Voltaire was forced to flee Paris, but the English edition became a British bestseller. There he wrote in English his first essays, Essay Upon Epic Poetry and Essay upon the Civil Wars in France, which were published in 1727. After his return to France he wrote plays, poetry, historical and scientific treatises and became royal historiographer. History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, which remains a classic in biography, appeared in 1731. While in England, Voltaire wrote the first of his historical works. Returning to France in 1729, he produced several tragedies, among them Brutus (1730) and Zaïre (1732). In 1733, at the age of thirty-nine, he started his famous sixteen-year liaison with Mme du Châtelet, whose intellectual interests, especially in science, accorded with his own. She was twenty-seven, married, and the mother of three children. The Marquis du Châtelet was well aware of the affair. Voltaire lived at the Château de Cirey with Madame du Châtelet in 1734-36 and 1737-40. At Cirey, Voltaire worked on physics and chemistry experiments and began his long correspondence with Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia (later Frederick II). In addition, he wrote Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (1736), which was partially responsible for bringing awareness of Newtonian physics to the Continent; a burlesque treatment of the Joan of Arc legends, La Pucelle (1755); and the dramas Mahomet (1742), Mérope (1743), and Sémiramis (1748). Between the years he took refuge in Holland (1736-37). In 1740 he was an ambassador-spy in Prussia, then in Brussels (1742-43), and in 1748 he was at the court of King Stanislas in Lunéville. From 1745 to 1750 he was a historiographer to Louis XV and in 1746 he was elected to the French Academy. At the invitation of Fredrick the Great, he moved in 1750 to Berlin, realizing eventually that the ruler was more enlightened in theory than in practice. In 1755 he settled in Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, apart from trips to France. Voltaire purchased (1758) an estate, Ferney, just over the French border, and conducted an extensive correspondence with most of the outstanding men and women of his time; received hosts of visitors who came to do homage to the “patriarch of Ferney”; employed himself in seeking justice for victims of religious or political persecution and in campaigning against the practice of torture; contributed to the Encyclopédie; and managed his estate, taking an active interest in improving the condition of his tenants. As an essayist he defended freedom of thoughts and religious tolerance. His Philosophical Dictionary (1764) was condemned in Paris, Geneva and Amsterdam, and for safety reasons Voltaire denied his authorship. He produced the first modern comparative history of civilizations, including Asia. An innovative aspect of Voltaire's history is that the chivalric hero is rejected for the 'good administrator', who protects liberties in order for society to prosper. He also edited the works of Corneille, wrote commentaries on Racine, and turned out a stream of anonymous novels and pamphlets in which he attacked the established institutions of his time with unremititbusng virulence. Ironically, it is one of these disavowed works, Candide (1759), that is most widely read today. It is the masterpiece among his “philosophical romances,” which also include the inimitable short tale Jeannot et Colin (1764), perhaps the quintessence of Voltaire’s style. In Candide Voltaire attacked the philosophical optimism made fashionable by Leibniz. Its conclusion, “Let us cultivate our garden” (instead of speculating on unanswerable problems), expresses succinctly Voltaire’s practical philosophy of common sense. In 1778, his 84th year, Voltaire attended the first performance of his tragedy Irène, in Paris. His journey and his reception were a triumph and apotheosis, but the emotion was too much for him and he died in Paris soon afterward. In order to obtain Christian burial he had signed a partial retraction of his writings. This was considered insufficient by the church, but he refused to sign a more general retraction. In his philosophy, based on skepticism and rationalism, he was indebted to Locke as well as to Montaigne and Bayle. Despite Voltaire’s passion for clarity and reason, he frequently contradicted himself. Thus he would maintain in one place that man’s nature was as unchangeable as that of animals and would express elsewhere his belief in progress and the gradual humanization of society through the action of the arts, sciences, and commerce. In politics he advocated reform but had a horror of the ignorance and potential fanaticism of people and the violence of revolution. In religion Voltaire felt that Christianity was a good thing for chambermaids and tailors to believe in, but for the use of the elite he advocated a simple deism. Voltaire’s influence in the popularization of the science and philosophy of his age was incalculably great. Perhaps his most lasting and original intellectual contribution was made in the field of history. He was a prolific writer, and produced works in almost every literary form, authoring plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, over 20,000 letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets. Voltaire was initiated into Freemasonry shortly before his death. On April 7, 1778 He accompanied Benjamin Franklin into Loge des Neuf Soeurs in Paris, France and became an Entered Apprentice Freemason. He distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. To him, only an enlightened monarch or an enlightened absolutist, advised by philosophers like himself, could bring about change as it was in the king's rational interest to improve the power and wealth of his subjects and kingdom. Voltaire essentially believed enlightened despotism to be the key to progress and change. Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778, the undisputed leader of the Age of Enlightenment. His remains were brought back to Paris in 1791 and buried in the Panthéon. |
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