voltaire biography

Author of the satirical novella 'Candide,' Voltaire is widely considered one of France's greatest Enlightenment writers.

(1694-1778)

Who Was Voltaire?

Voltaire established himself as one of the leading writers of the Enlightenment. His famed works include the tragic play Zaïre , the historical study The Age of Louis XIV and the satirical novella Candide . Often at odds with French authorities over his politically and religiously charged works, he was twice imprisoned and spent many years in exile. He died shortly after returning to Paris in 1778.

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet to a prosperous family on November 21, 1694, in Paris, France. He was the youngest of five children born to François Arouet and Marie Marguerite d'Aumart. When Voltaire was just seven years old, his mother passed away. Following her death, he grew closer to his free-thinking godfather.

In 1704, Voltaire was enrolled at the Collége Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit secondary school in Paris, where he received a classical education and began showing promise as a writer.

Beliefs and Philosophy

Embracing Enlightenment philosophers such as Isaac Newton , John Locke and Francis Bacon , Voltaire found inspiration in their ideals of a free and liberal society, along with freedom of religion and free commerce.

Voltaire, in keeping with other Enlightenment thinkers of the era, was a deist — not by faith, according to him, but rather by reason. He looked favorably on religious tolerance, even though he could be severely critical towards Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

As a vegetarian and an advocate of animal rights, however, Voltaire praised Hinduism, stating Hindus were "[a] peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves."

Major Works

Voltaire wrote poetry and plays, as well as historical and philosophical works. His most well-known poetry includes The Henriade (1723) and The Maid of Orleans , which he started writing in 1730 but never fully completed.

Among the earliest of Voltaire's best-known plays is his adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus , which was first performed in 1718. Voltaire followed with a string of dramatic tragedies, including Mariamne (1724). His Zaïre (1732), written in verse, was something of a departure from previous works: Until that point, Voltaire's tragedies had centered on a fatal flaw in the protagonist's character; however, the tragedy in Zaïre was the result of circumstance. Following Zaïre, Voltaire continued to write tragic plays, including Mahomet (1736) and Nanine (1749).

Voltaire's body of writing also includes the notable historical works The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). In the latter, Voltaire took a unique approach to tracing the progression of world civilization by focusing on social history and the arts.

Voltaire's popular philosophic works took the form of the short stories Micromégas (1752) and Plato's Dream (1756), as well as the famed satirical novella Candide (1759), which is considered Voltaire's greatest work. Candide is filled with philosophical and religious parody, and in the end the characters reject optimism. There is great debate on whether Voltaire was making an actual statement about embracing a pessimistic philosophy or if he was trying to encourage people to be actively involved to improve society.

In 1764, he published another of his acclaimed philosophical works, Dictionnaire philosophique , an encyclopedic dictionary that embraced the concepts of Enlightenment and rejected the ideas of the Roman Catholic Church.

Arrests and Exiles

In 1716, Voltaire was exiled to Tulle for mocking the duc d'Orleans. In 1717, he returned to Paris, only to be arrested and exiled to the Bastille for a year on charges of writing libelous poetry. Voltaire was sent to the Bastille again in 1726, for arguing with the Chevalier de Rohan. This time he was only detained briefly before being exiled to England, where he remained for nearly three years.

The publication of Voltaire's Letters on the English (1733) angered the French church and government, forcing the writer to flee to safer pastures. He spent the next 15 years with his mistress, Émilie du Châtelet, at her husband's home in Cirey-sur-Blaise.

Voltaire moved to Prussia in 1750 as a member of Frederick the Great's court, and spent later years in Geneva and Ferney. By 1778, he was recognized as an icon of the Enlightenment's progressive ideals, and he was given a hero's welcome upon his return to Paris. He died there shortly afterward, on May 30, 1778.

In 1952, researcher and writer Theodore Besterman established a museum devoted to Voltaire in Geneva. He later set about writing a biography of his favorite subject, and following his death in 1976, the Voltaire Foundation was vested permanently at the University of Oxford.

The foundation continued to work toward making the Enlightenment writer's prolific output available to the public. It was later announced that The Oxford Complete Works of Voltaire , the first exhaustive annotated edition of Voltaire’s novels, plays and letters, would expand to 220 volumes by 2020.

In November 2017, during an event to celebrate what would have been Voltaire's 323rd birthday, foundation director Nicholas Cronk explained how the famed writer used inaccuracies to generate attention. Among his fabrications, Voltaire offered up differing dates for his birthday and lied about the identity of his biological father.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Voltaire
• Birth Year: 1694
• Birth date: November 21, 1694
• Birth City: Paris
• Birth Country: France
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Author of the satirical novella 'Candide,' Voltaire is widely considered one of France's greatest Enlightenment writers.
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Collége Louis-le-Grand
• Nationalities
• Occupations
• Death Year: 1778
• Death date: May 30, 1778
• Death City: Paris
• Death Country: France

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Voltaire (1694-1778) was a French author, historian, and philosopher whose thoughts on religious toleration and moderation of authoritarian power were influential during the Enlightenment . His most famous work today is the satirical Candide, which presents Voltaire's critical thoughts on other philosophers, the Catholic Church, and the French state in order to highlight the need for real solutions to everyday problems.

François-Marie Arouet, better known by his chosen pseudonym Voltaire, was born in Paris on 21 November 1694. Françoise-Marie's father was a notary who sent him to the highly esteemed Louis-le-Grand college, then run by Jesuits. Going on to study law , Françoise-Marie's real interest was literature , and he was soon writing his own poems and plays. These early offerings were the beginning of what would turn out to be a momentous catalogue of works of all kinds by the end of Voltaire's long career.

In 1718, Voltaire's first play, Oedipus , was successfully staged, and he had his first poem, La Henriade , published to great acclaim in 1723. Voltaire might have had literary aspirations, but his fledgling career took a nosedive in 1726 when, after an argument with the Chevalier de Rohan, he was confined in the infamous Bastille prison. When he got out, Voltaire decided to broaden his horizons, and he visited first the Netherlands and then England , where he lived until 1729.

Philosophical Ideas

Voltaire's three years in England saw him embark on a more philosophical approach to literature. He wrote his Letters on England (aka Philosophical Letters ) based on his experiences in that country. The Letters was published in 1734 and favourably compared the relative openness and liberalism present in England compared to France. Voltaire argues that different denominations of Christianity should be tolerated in the same society. This is based on his belief that toleration springs from no single group being able to claim absolute truth. He proposes that the best form of government is a monarchy limited in its power by a parliament and constitution. Voltaire believes that because humans are rational and act with reasonable self-interest, they should be given more liberty than current authoritarian government systems allow. He also gives biographies of four leading thinkers who influenced the later Enlightenment: Francis Bacon (1561-1626), John Locke (1632-1704), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and René Descartes (1596-1650). In summary, Voltaire argues that the greater freedom and toleration he has witnessed in England compared to France is also the reason why that country is more prosperous and its citizens happier. The French Parlement did not take kindly to this assessment, and Letters on England was condemned.

Madame du Châtelet

Voltaire had returned to France, but given the uproar his Letters on England had caused with the Establishment, he was obliged to seek obscurity for a while. He lived with Gabrielle Émilie, Marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), who first translated Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy into French. The two had met in 1733, and in 1734, Voltaire stayed with the marquise in her country retreat of Cirey in the Champagne region. Together, they pursued their mutual interest in biblical studies, history, and physics. The couple's romantic relationship, besides the complication of the marquise's husband, survived the presence of another love interest, Jean François de Saint-Lambert. Voltaire finally left Cirey in 1744. The marquise became pregnant with the child of Jean François, but she died giving birth in September 1749.

Encyclopedia & Rulers

Voltaire was appointed the royal historiographer in 1745, a position he kept for two years. In 1746, he was elected to the prestigious Académie française and to the Accademia della Crusca in Florence. Voltaire contributed to the 17-volume Encyclopédie , published from 1751 and regularly expanded. This influential new compendium of knowledge, edited by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), presented provocative new ideas in philosophy and science .

Voltaire also involved himself in politics in the 1740s, typically in the form of diplomatic missions on behalf of the government. Keen to see firsthand how authoritarian rulers operated, Voltaire spent time at various royal courts, most notably Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (r. 1740-1786). Voltaire was interested in observing what historians later called 'enlightened despots', even if they rarely or ever achieved precisely what Voltaire and others proposed as the best strategies of statecraft for a fairer and happier society. Voltaire got into serious trouble in Prussia, involving himself in a scandalous legal case and taking a compromising book of Frederick's private poems without the ruler's permission (he was arrested and forced to return it). Ultimately, Voltaire wisened up to the darker side of monarchs, lamenting in a 1775 letter to Frederick: "You kings, you put us on our guard, you are like Homer 's gods who make men serve their purposes without these poor people suspecting it" (Robertson, 668).

The tendency for some rulers to court philosophers and try to modernise their respective states (if only in the sense of abolishing some of the harsher medieval conventions) at least indicates that the Enlightenment was beginning to shine on practical politics and reflected "a rise in the status of intellectuals, and a new awareness of the potential uses of knowledge by those in power" (Chisick, 156).

The Great Historian

From 1755, Voltaire lived near Geneva in a château, such was his success. Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations ( Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations ) was published in 1756 but constantly revised by Voltaire, who seems to have considered it his greatest endeavour. Actually a work of history, Voltaire summarises European history from the 8th century to the early 18th century and so earned a reputation as one of the great historians of the Enlightenment. The history attempted to shift the usual focus on religious affairs and wars to a more secular treatment of cultural events. Voltaire refused to give rulers and generals the traditional prominence other historians had given them. Another innovation was that Voltaire considered the history and cultural practices of states typically ignored by European authors, such as China , India , and various Islamic states. These exotic cultures were often used to demonstrate that the French were not quite as enlightened as they thought they were and to show that claims that Christian ideals had a monopoly on how best to live were nonsense.

Voltaire pioneered a new form of literature, the conte , a short and imaginative flight of fancy similar to ancient oral storytelling. The conte genre allows a writer to present serious ideas in an exotic or fanciful setting that both entertains the reader and sets them thinking. Voltaire's masterpiece in this new style was Candide , published in 1759. It is an often pessimistic work that sees the gradual disillusionment of the naive central character, Candide, who travels around the world in pursuit of his love Cunégonde. Through the story, Voltaire presents withering criticisms of the French state, especially the nobility, as well as the Church, and particularly his old school chums, the Jesuits. Others to feel the wrath of the author's pen include owners of Caribbean sugar plantations where slave labour is used and intellectuals who insist on defending an obviously defunct status quo. The single ray of hope Voltaire presents is that if we recognise the harshness of life, we can do something about it using reason to make practical improvements. Voltaire rejects the lofty utopian thoughts of other thinkers (especially Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ) in favour of simpler and more practical solutions to society's present problems. Despite the pessimism, Voltaire was confident that reason was being used as never before in his own lifetime, a period he described in another work as "the most enlightened age the world has ever seen" (Gottlieb, 238). Candide 's other title was, after all, L'optimisme . Candide was a roaring success, and in its first year alone, the publishers were obliged to print eight editions. The book was translated into English in 1759. Meanwhile, Voltaire returned to history and worked on a flattering biography of Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725).

Final Thoughts

In 1759, Voltaire returned to France and lived at Ferney, near the French border with Switzerland. Here, he spent a great deal of time gardening when not writing. Voltaire published his Treatise on Tolerance in 1762 and Dictionnaire Philosophique ( Philosophical Dictionary ) in 1764. Here, like in his other works, he attacks superstition, metaphysics, religious dogma, and the dangers of authoritarian governments. The latter work is curious since it is neither a dictionary nor particularly philosophical, but rather a loose collection of articles (which Voltaire kept adding to in each new addition) providing enlightened readers with countless reasons why the Old Regime of France needs changing. It is in this work that Voltaire most clearly presents his view on morals.

Voltaire was a deist, that is, someone who believes in the presence of God as a creator but believes that, much like a watchmaker who then abandons his work, God is not available for communication or interaction in the world he has created. This led to Voltaire erroneously believing that life as we know it was unchanging, that is, for example, all species had always been the same since the Creation. Another consequence of Voltaire's thought of God's abandonment was that evil and misfortune will forever persist in plaguing humanity. One such catastrophe was the devastating Lisbon earthquake on 1 November 1755, which moved Voltaire to write another work disparaging the belief that ‘everything happens for the best', his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ( Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon ).

Voltaire believed that God had given all humans an innate need for a moral code (although not the code itself), which they create, employ, and abide by because they possess reason. What Voltaire did not believe in was the trappings of man-made religion . He states in the Philosophical Dictionary that religion "is the source of all the follies and turmoils imaginable, it is the mother of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind" (Gottlieb, 233).

For Voltaire, there is a God, but that deity is unknowable, as are many things we know exist, such as the universal law of gravity. He again expresses his despair at never being able to grasp certain fundamentals in his Philosophe ignorant ( Ignorant Philosopher ), published in 1766:

Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing? What will become of you? This is a question one must put to every creature in the universe, but none of them give us any answer. (Hampson, 122)

Voltaire, just as he had sought out practical experience to confirm his political views, was also willing to test his ideas on religious toleration in the crucible of a court of law. Through the 1760s, Voltaire took up the cases of three infamous miscarriages of justice involving Jean Calas, Chevalier de la Barre, and the Sirven family. Voltaire used the cases, all involving Catholic intolerance, as inspiration for more writings on the necessity of reasoned tolerance in society. His appeal for tolerance, particularly of Protestants, is summarised in this passage from the Treatise on Tolerance :

Is each individual citizen, then, to be permitted to believe only in what his reason tells him, to think only what his reason, be it enlightened or misguided, may dictate? Yes, indeed he should, provided always that he threatens no disturbance to public order. (Robertson, 125)

Voltaire's Major Works

The most important works of the philosopher Voltaire include:

• Oedipus (1718)
• La Henriade (1723)
• Letters on England (1734)
• Zadig (1747)
• Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations (1756)
• Candide (1759)
• Treatise on Tolerance (1762)
• Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
• Ignorant Philosopher (1766)

Death & Legacy

Voltaire spent his final day on this earth in Paris, having just returned to the city of his birth the night before. He had accumulated great wealth through his literary career and banking activities, wisely investing in ever grander estates and so eventually becoming a part of the lower nobility. He died on 30 May 1778. Voltaire's remains were interred in the crypt of the Panthéon in Paris in 1791. This act of honour was carried out by the revolutionaries of the French Revolution , which is rather ironic since Voltaire would have been aghast at the trial and execution of Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) two years later. Voltaire's ideas on the dangers of authoritarian government and the abuses of church power had appealed to the revolutionaries, but he had never been a man of the people. As he once wrote in a letter to a friend: "Enlightened times will enlighten only a small number of honest people. The vulgar masses will always be fanatics" (Gottlieb, 233).

According to the historian H. Chisick, Voltaire, "more than any other represented the Enlightenment to his contemporaries" (430). Less an original philosopher and more a destroyer of the old attitudes that permitted fellow thinkers like John Locke to flourish, Voltaire has earned his place among the great group of French-speaking philosophes, which includes Montesquieu (1689-1757), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and Diderot. As the latter once stated: "we live in a century in which the philosophical spirit has rid us of a great number of prejudices" (Robertson, 27), and Voltaire had done more than most to challenge those prejudices.

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Bibliography

• Berlin, Isaiah. The Age of Enlightenment. Signet, 1956.
• Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy . Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Cameron, Euan. Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Chisick, Harvey. Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment . Scarecrow Press, 2005.
• Gottlieb, Anthony. The Dream of Enlightenment. Liveright, 2017.
• Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment. Penguin Books, 1991.
• Law, Stephen. The Great Philosophers. Quercus, 2009.
• Robertson, Ritchie. The Enlightenment. Harper, 2021.
• Voltaire. Candide and Zadig. Könemann
• Yolton, John W. & Rogers, Pat & Porter, Roy & Stafford, Barbara. A Companion to the Enlightenment . Wiley-Blackwell, 1991.

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François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.

To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history of philosophy, this article will be structured in a particular way. First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. Second, a survey of Voltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach the legacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that his activities reinforced.

1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)

1.2 the english period (1726–1729), 1.3 becoming a philosophe, 1.4 the newton wars (1732–1745), 1.5 from french newtonian to enlightenment philosophe (1745–1755), 1.6 fighting for philosophie (1755–1778), 1.7 voltaire, philosophe icon of enlightenment philosophie (1778–present), 2.1 liberty, 2.2 hedonism, 2.3 skepticism, 2.4 newtonian empirical science, 2.5 toward science without metaphysics, primary literature, primary literature in translation, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries, 1. voltaire’s life: the philosopher as critic and public activist.

Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. His work Lettres philosophiques , published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date, Voltaire’s life in no way pointed him toward the philosophical destiny that he was later to assume. His early orientation toward literature and libertine sociability, however, shaped his philosophical identity in crucial ways.

François-Marie d’Arouet was born in 1694, the fourth of five children, to a well-to-do public official and his well bred aristocratic wife. In its fusion of traditional French aristocratic pedigree with the new wealth and power of royal bureaucratic administration, the d’Arouet family was representative of elite society in France during the reign of Louis XIV. The young François-Marie acquired from his parents the benefits of prosperity and political favor, and from the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris he also acquired a first-class education. François-Marie also acquired an introduction to modern letters from his father who was active in the literary culture of the period both in Paris and at the royal court of Versailles. François senior appears to have enjoyed the company of men of letters, yet his frustration with his son’s ambition to become a writer is notorious. From early in his youth, Voltaire aspired to emulate his idols Molière, Racine, and Corneille and become a playwright, yet Voltaire’s father strenuously opposed the idea, hoping to install his son instead in a position of public authority. First as a law student, then as a lawyer’s apprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaire attempted to fulfill his father’s wishes. But in each case, he ended up abandoning his posts, sometimes amidst scandal.

Escaping from the burdens of these public obligations, Voltaire would retreat into the libertine sociability of Paris. It was here in the 1720s, during the culturally vibrant period of the Regency government between the reigns of Louis XIV and XV (1715–1723), that Voltaire established one dimension of his identity. His wit and congeniality were legendary even as a youth, so he had few difficulties establishing himself as a popular figure in Regency literary circles. He also learned how to play the patronage game so important to those with writerly ambitions. Thanks, therefore, to some artfully composed writings, a couple of well-made contacts, more than a few bon mots , and a little successful investing, especially during John Law’s Mississippi Bubble fiasco, Voltaire was able to establish himself as an independent man of letters in Paris. His literary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of his Oedipe , a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked the French classicism of Racine and Corneille. The play was first performed at the home of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, a sign of Voltaire’s quick ascent to the very pinnacle of elite literary society. Its published title page also announced the new pen name that Voltaire would ever after deploy.

During the Regency, Voltaire circulated widely in elite circles such as those that congregated at Sceaux, but he also cultivated more illicit and libertine sociability as well. This pairing was not at all uncommon during this time, and Voltaire’s intellectual work in the 1720s—a mix of poems and plays that shifted between playful libertinism and serious classicism seemingly without pause—illustrated perfectly the values of pleasure, honnêteté , and good taste that were the watchwords of this cultural milieu. Philosophy was also a part of this mix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shaped by his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke lived in exile in France during the Regency period, and Voltaire was a frequent visitor to La Source, the Englishman’s estate near Orléans. The chateau served as a reunion point for a wide range of intellectuals, and many believe that Voltaire was first introduced to natural philosophy generally, and to the work of Locke and the English Newtonians specifically, at Bolingbroke’s estate. It was certainly true that these ideas, especially in their more deistic and libertine configurations, were at the heart of Bolingbroke’s identity.

Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way, its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile in England between 1726–29. The occasion for his departure was an affair of honor. A very powerful aristocrat, the Duc de Rohan, accused Voltaire of defamation, and in the face of this charge the untitled writer chose to save face and avoid more serious prosecution by leaving the country indefinitely. In the spring of 1726, therefore, Voltaire left Paris for England.

It was during his English period that Voltaire’s transition into his mature philosophe identity began. Bolingbroke, whose address Voltaire left in Paris as his own forwarding address, was one conduit of influence. In particular, Voltaire met through Bolingbroke Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, writers who were at that moment beginning to experiment with the use of literary forms such as the novel and theater in the creation of a new kind of critical public politics. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels , which appeared only months before Voltaire’s arrival, is the most famous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with political criticism. Later the same year Bolingbroke also brought out the first issue of the Craftsman , a political journal that served as the public platform for his circle’s Tory opposition to the Whig oligarchy in England. The Craftsman helped to create English political journalism in the grand style, and for the next three years Voltaire moved in Bolingbroke’s circle, absorbing the culture and sharing in the public political contestation that was percolating all around him.

Voltaire did not restrict himself to Bolingbroke’s circle alone, however. After Bolingbroke, his primary contact in England was a merchant by the name of Everard Fawkener. Fawkener introduced Voltaire to a side of London life entirely different from that offered by Bolingbroke’s circle of Tory intellectuals. This included the Whig circles that Bolingbroke’s group opposed. It also included figures such as Samuel Clarke and other self-proclaimed Newtonians. Voltaire did not meet Newton himself before Sir Isaac’s death in March, 1727, but he did meet his sister—learning from her the famous myth of Newton’s apple, which Voltaire would play a major role in making famous. Voltaire also came to know the other Newtonians in Clarke’s circle, and since he became proficient enough with English to write letters and even fiction in the language, it is very likely that he immersed himself in their writings as well. Voltaire also visited Holland during these years, forming important contacts with Dutch journalists and publishers and meeting Willem’s Gravesande and other Dutch Newtonian savants. Given his other activities, it is also likely that Voltaire frequented the coffeehouses of London even if no firm evidence survives confirming that he did. It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn that Voltaire attended the Newtonian public lectures of John Theophilus Desaguliers or those of one of his rivals. Whatever the precise conduits, all of his encounters in England made Voltaire into a very knowledgeable student of English natural philosophy.

When French officials granted Voltaire permission to re-enter Paris in 1729, he was devoid of pensions and banned from the royal court at Versailles. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. It is no doubt overly grandiose to say with Lord Morley that, “Voltaire left France a poet and returned to it a sage.” It is also an exaggeration to say that he was transformed from a poet into a philosophe while in England. For one, these two sides of Voltaire’s intellectual identity were forever intertwined, and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into the other at any point in his life. But the English years did trigger a transformation in him.

After his return to France, Voltaire worked hard to restore his sources of financial and political support. The financial problems were the easiest to solve. In 1729, the French government staged a sort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. A friend perceived an opportunity for investors in the structure of the government’s offering, and at a dinner attended by Voltaire he formed a society to purchase shares. Voltaire participated, and in the fall of that year when the returns were posted he had made a fortune. Voltaire’s inheritance from his father also became available to him at the same time, and from this date forward Voltaire never again struggled financially. This result was no insignificant development since Voltaire’s financial independence effectively freed him from one dimension of the patronage system so necessary to aspiring writers and intellectuals in the period. In particular, while other writers were required to appeal to powerful financial patrons in order to secure the livelihood that made possible their intellectual careers, Voltaire was never again beholden to these imperatives.

The patronage structures of Old Regime France provided more than economic support to writers, however, and restoring the crédit upon which his reputation as a writer and thinker depended was far less simple. Gradually, however, through a combination of artfully written plays, poems, and essays and careful self-presentation in Parisian society, Voltaire began to regain his public stature. In the fall of 1732, when the next stage in his career began to unfold, Voltaire was residing at the royal court of Versailles, a sign that his re-establishment in French society was all but complete.

During this rehabilitation, Voltaire also formed a new relationship that was to prove profoundly influential in the subsequent decades. He became reacquainted with Emilie Le Tonnier de Breteuil,the daughter of one of his earliest patrons, who married in 1722 to become the Marquise du Châtelet. Emilie du Châtelet was not quite twenty-seven years old in the spring of 1733 when Voltaire began his relationship with her. She was also a uniquely accomplished woman. Du Châtelet’s father, the Baron de Breteuil, hosted a regular gathering of men of letters that included Voltaire, and his daughter, ten years younger than Voltaire, shared in these associations. Her father also ensured that Emilie received an education that was exceptional for girls at the time. She studied Greek and Latin and trained in mathematics, and when Voltaire reconnected with her in 1733 she was a very knowledgeable thinker in her own right even if her own intellectual career, which would include an original treatise in natural philosophy and a complete French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica —still the only complete French translation ever published—had not yet begun. Her intellectual talents combined with her vivacious personality drew Voltaire to her, and although Du Châtelet was a titled aristocrat married to an important military officer, the couple was able to form a lasting partnership that did not interfere with Du Châtelet’s marriage. This arrangement proved especially beneficial to Voltaire when scandal forced him to flee Paris and to establish himself permanently at the Du Châtelet family estate at Cirey. From 1734, when this arrangement began, to 1749, when Du Châtelet died during childbirth, Cirey was the home to each along with the site of an intense intellectual collaboration. It was during this period that both Voltaire and Du Châtelet became widely known philosophical figures, and the intellectual history of each before 1749 is most accurately described as the history of the couple’s joint intellectual endeavors.

For Voltaire, the events that sent him fleeing to Cirey were also the impetus for much of his work while there. While in England, Voltaire had begun to compose a set of letters framed according to the well-established genre of a traveler reporting to friends back home about foreign lands. Montesquieu’s 1721 Lettres Persanes , which offered a set of fictionalized letters by Persians allegedly traveling in France, and Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels were clear influences when Voltaire conceived his work. But unlike the authors of these overtly fictionalized accounts, Voltaire innovated by adopting a journalistic stance instead, one that offered readers an empirically recognizable account of several aspects of English society. Originally titled Letters on England , Voltaire left a draft of the text with a London publisher before returning home in 1729. Once in France, he began to expand the work, adding to the letters drafted while in England, which focused largely on the different religious sects of England and the English Parliament, several new letters including some on English philosophy. The new text, which included letters on Bacon, Locke, Newton and the details of Newtonian natural philosophy along with an account of the English practice of inoculation for smallpox, also acquired a new title when it was first published in France in 1734: Lettres philosophiques .

Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. His publisher, however, ultimately released the book without these approvals and without Voltaire’s permission. This made the first edition of the Lettres philosophiques illicit, a fact that contributed to the scandal that it triggered, but one that in no way explains the furor the book caused. Historians in fact still scratch their heads when trying to understand why Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques proved to be so controversial. The only thing that is clear is that the work did cause a sensation that subsequently triggered a rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the French authorities. The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman several months after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widely known intellectual outlaw. Had it been executed, a royal lettre de cachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of the Bastille as a result of his authorship of Lettres philosophiques ; instead, he was able to flee with Du Châtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty granted by her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base for Voltaire’s new position as a philosophical rebel and writer in exile.

Had Voltaire been able to avoid the scandal triggered by the Lettres philosophiques , it is highly likely that he would have chosen to do so. Yet once it was thrust upon him, he adopted the identity of the philosophical exile and outlaw writer with conviction, using it to create a new identity for himself, one that was to have far reaching consequences for the history of Western philosophy. At first, Newtonian science served as the vehicle for this transformation. In the decades before 1734, a series of controversies had erupted, especially in France, about the character and legitimacy of Newtonian science, especially the theory of universal gravitation and the physics of gravitational attraction through empty space. Voltaire positioned his Lettres philosophiques as an intervention into these controversies, drafting a famous and widely cited letter that used an opposition between Newton and Descartes to frame a set of fundamental differences between English and French philosophy at the time. He also included other letters about Newtonian science in the work while linking (or so he claimed) the philosophies of Bacon, Locke, and Newton into an English philosophical complex that he championed as a remedy for the perceived errors and illusions perpetuated on the French by René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche. Voltaire did not invent this framework, but he did use it to enflame a set of debates that were then raging, debates that placed him and a small group of young members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris into apparent opposition to the older and more established members of this bastion of official French science. Once installed at Cirey, both Voltaire and Du Châtelet further exploited this apparent division by engaging in a campaign on behalf of Newtonianism, one that continually targeted an imagined monolith called French Academic Cartesianism as the enemy against which they in the name of Newtonianism were fighting.

The centerpiece of this campaign was Voltaire’s Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton , which was first published in 1738 and then again in 1745 in a new and definitive edition that included a new section, first published in 1740, devoted to Newton’s metaphysics. Voltaire offered this book as a clear, accurate, and accessible account of Newton’s philosophy suitable for ignorant Frenchman (a group that he imagined to be large). But he also conceived of it as a machine de guerre directed against the Cartesian establishment, which he believed was holding France back from the modern light of scientific truth. Vociferous criticism of Voltaire and his work quickly erupted, with some critics emphasizing his rebellious and immoral proclivities while others focused on his precise scientific views. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into a singular vision of his enemy as “backward Cartesianism”. As he fought fiercely to defend his positions, an unprecedented culture war erupted in France centered on the character and value of Newtonian natural philosophy. Du Châtelet contributed to this campaign by writing a celebratory review of Voltaire’s Éléments in the Journal des savants , the most authoritative French learned periodical of the day. The couple also added to their scientific credibility by receiving separate honorable mentions in the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire. Voltaire likewise worked tirelessly rebutting critics and advancing his positions in pamphlets and contributions to learned periodicals. By 1745, when the definitive edition of Voltaire’s Éléments was published, the tides of thought were turning his way, and by 1750 the perception had become widespread that France had been converted from backward, erroneous Cartesianism to modern, Enlightened Newtonianism thanks to the heroic intellectual efforts of figures like Voltaire.

This apparent victory in the Newton Wars of the 1730s and 1740s allowed Voltaire’s new philosophical identity to solidify. Especially crucial was the way that it allowed Voltaire’s outlaw status, which he had never fully repudiated, to be rehabilitated in the public mind as a necessary and heroic defense of philosophical truth against the enemies of error and prejudice. From this perspective, Voltaire’s critical stance could be reintegrated into traditional Old Regime society as a new kind of legitimate intellectual martyrdom. Since Voltaire also coupled his explicitly philosophical writings and polemics during the 1730s and 1740s with an equally extensive stream of plays, poems, stories, and narrative histories, many of which were orthogonal in both tone and content to the explicit campaigns of the Newton Wars, Voltaire was further able to reestablish his old identity as an Old Regime man of letters despite the scandals of these years. In 1745, Voltaire was named the Royal Historiographer of France, a title bestowed upon him as a result of his histories of Louis XIV and the Swedish King Charles II. This royal office also triggered the writing of arguably Voltaire’s most widely read and influential book, at least in the eighteenth century, Essais sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1751), a pioneering work of universal history. The position also legitimated him as an officially sanctioned savant. In 1749, after the death of du Châtelet, Voltaire reinforced this impression by accepting an invitation to join the court of the young Frederick the Great in Prussia, a move that further assimilated him into the power structures of Old Regime society.

Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder of Voltaire’s life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophy might not have been so great. Yet during the 1750s, a set of new developments pulled Voltaire back toward his more radical and controversial identity and allowed him to rekindle the critical philosophe persona that he had innovated during the Newton Wars. The first step in this direction involved a dispute with his onetime colleague and ally, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate for Newtonian science in France. When Voltaire was preparing his own Newtonian intervention in the Lettres philosophiques in 1732, he consulted with Maupertuis, who was by this date a pensioner in the French Royal Academy of Sciences. It was largely around Maupertuis that the young cohort of French academic Newtonians gathered during the Newton wars of 1730s and 40s, and with Voltaire fighting his own public campaigns on behalf of this same cause during the same period, the two men became the most visible faces of French Newtonianism even if they never really worked as a team in this effort. Like Voltaire, Maupertuis also shared a relationship with Emilie du Châtelet, one that included mathematical collaborations that far exceeded Voltaire’s capacities. Maupertuis was also an occasional guest at Cirey, and a correspondent with both du Châtelet and Voltaire throughout these years. But in 1745 Maupertuis surprised all of French society by moving to Berlin to accept the directorship of Frederick the Great’s newly reformed Berlin Academy of Sciences.

Maupertuis’s thought at the time of his departure for Prussia was turning toward the metaphysics and rationalist epistemology of Leibniz as a solution to certain questions in natural philosophy. Du Châtelet also shared this tendency, producing in 1740 her Institutions de physiques , a systematic attempt to wed Newtonian mechanics with Leibnizian rationalism and metaphysics. Voltaire found this Leibnizian turn dyspeptic, and he began to craft an anti-Leibnizian discourse in the 1740s that became a bulwark of his brand of Newtonianism. This placed him in opposition to Du Châtelet, even if this intellectual rift in no way soured their relationship. Yet after she died in 1749, and Voltaire joined Maupertuis at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin, this anti-Leibnizianism became the centerpiece of a rift with Maupertuis. Voltaire’s public satire of the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin published in late 1752, which presented Maupertuis as a despotic philosophical buffoon, forced Frederick to make a choice. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to either retract his libelous text or leave Berlin. Voltaire chose the latter, falling once again into the role of scandalous rebel and exile as a result of his writings.

This event proved to be Voltaire’s last official rupture with establishment authority. Rather than returning home to Paris and restoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. When this austere Calvinist enclave proved completely unwelcoming, he took further steps toward independence by using his personal fortune to buy a chateau of his own in the hinterlands between France and Switzerland. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early 1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateau his permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of his intellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment.

During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his most famous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as a member of the “party of humanity” and devoting himself toward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism and superstition. While the singular defense of Newtonian science had focused Voltaire’s polemical energies in the 1730s and 1740s, after 1750 the program became the defense of philosophie tout court and the defeat of its perceived enemies within the ecclesiastical and aristo-monarchical establishment. In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, “ Écrasez l’infâme! ” (“Crush the infamy!”). This entanglement of philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action, a contingent historical outcome of Voltaire’s particular intellectual career, would become his most lasting contribution to the history of philosophy.

The first cause to galvanize this new program was Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie . The first volume of this compendium of definitions appeared in 1751, and almost instantly the work became buried in the kind of scandal to which Voltaire had grown accustomed. Voltaire saw in the controversy a new call to action, and he joined forces with the project soon after its appearance, penning numerous articles that began to appear with volume 5 in 1755. Scandal continued to chase the Encyclopédie , however, and in 1759 the work’s publication privilege was revoked in France, an act that did not kill the project but forced it into illicit production in Switzerland. During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside the project’s editors to defend the work, fusing the Encyclopédie ’s enemies, particularly the Parisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical the Journal de Trevoux , into a monolithic “infamy” devoted to eradicating truth and light from the world. This framing was recapitulated by the opponents of the Encyclopédie , who began to speak of the loose assemblage of authors who contributed articles to the work as a subversive coterie of philosophes devoted to undermining legitimate social and moral order.

As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence, Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. He formed particularly close ties with d’Alembert, and with him began to generalize a broad program for Enlightenment centered on rallying the newly self-conscious philosophes (a term often used synonymously with the Encyclopédistes ) toward political and intellectual change. In this program, the philosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy but through a commitment to the program of defending philosophie itself against its perceived enemies. They were also imagined as activists fighting to eradicate error and superstition from the world. The ongoing defense of the Encyclopédie was one rallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuits—the great enemies of Enlightenment, the philosophes proclaimed—became a second unifying cause. This effort achieved victory in 1763, and soon the philosophes were attempting to infiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge in France. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when the Encyclopédiste and friend of Voltaire and the philosophes , Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was named Controller-General of France, the most powerful ministerial position in the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. Voltaire and his allies had paved the way for this victory through a barrage of writings throughout the 1760s and 1770s that presented philosophie like that espoused by Turgot as an agent of enlightened reform and its critics as prejudicial defenders of an ossified tradition.

Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in support this campaign, his Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764–1770. This book republished his articles from the original Encyclopédie while adding new entries conceived in the spirit of the original work. Yet to fully understand the brand of philosophie that Voltaire made foundational to the Enlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulated in fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other less obviously philosophical genres. Voltaire’s most widely known text, for instance, Candide, ou l’Optimisme , first published in 1759, is a fictional story of a wandering traveler engaged in a set of farcical adventures. Yet contained in the text is a serious attack on Leibnizian philosophy, one that in many ways marks the culmination of Voltaire’s decades long attack on this philosophy started during the Newton wars. Philosophie à la Voltaire also came in the form of political activism, such as his public defense of Jean Calas who, Voltaire argued, was a victim of a despotic state and an irrational and brutal judicial system. Voltaire often attached philosophical reflection to this political advocacy, such as when he facilitated a French translation of Cesare Beccaria’s treatise on humanitarian justice and penal reform and then prefaced the work with his own essay on justice and religious toleration (Calas was a French protestant persecuted by a Catholic monarchy). Public philosophic campaigns such as these that channeled critical reason in a direct, oppositionalist way against the perceived injustices and absurdities of Old Regime life were the hallmark of philosophie as Voltaire understood the term.

Voltaire lived long enough to see some of his long-term legacies start to concretize. With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774 and the appointment of Turgot as Controller-General, the French establishment began to embrace the philosophes and their agenda in a new way. Critics of Voltaire and his program for philosophie remained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as the necessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenment philosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, and courageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltaire bequeathed to later generations. During Voltaire’s lifetime, this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early 1778. Here, as a frail and sickly octogenarian, Voltaire was welcomed by the city as the hero of the Enlightenment that he now personified. A statue was commissioned as a permanent shrine to his legacy, and a public performance of his play Irène was performed in a way that allowed its author to be celebrated as a national hero. Voltaire died several weeks after these events, but the canonization that they initiated has continued right up until the present.

Western philosophy was profoundly shaped by the conception of the philosophe and the program for Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify. The model he offered of the philosophe as critical public citizen and advocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinker only when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in the subsequent development of the European philosophy. Also influential was the example he offered of the philosopher measuring the value of any philosophy according by its ability to effect social change. In this respect, Karl Marx’s famous thesis that philosophy should aspire to change the world, not merely interpret it, owes more than a little debt Voltaire. The link between Voltaire and Marx was also established through the French revolutionary tradition, which similarly adopted Voltaire as one of its founding heroes. Voltaire was the first person to be honored with re-burial in the newly created Pantheon of the Great Men of France that the new revolutionary government created in 1791. This act served as a tribute to the connections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaire’s philosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization as a whole. In a similar way, Voltaire remains today an iconic hero for everyone who sees a positive linkage between critical reason and political resistance in projects of progressive, modernizing reform.

2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy

Voltaire’s philosophical legacy ultimately resides as much in how he practiced philosophy, and in the ends toward which he directed his philosophical activity, as in any specific doctrine or original idea. Yet the particular philosophical positions he took, and the way that he used his wider philosophical campaigns to champion certain understandings while disparaging others, did create a constellation appropriately called Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. True to Voltaire’s character, this constellation is best described as a set of intellectual stances and orientations rather than as a set of doctrines or systematically defended positions. Nevertheless, others found in Voltaire both a model of the well-oriented philosophe and a set of particular philosophical positions appropriate to this stance. Each side of this equation played a key role in defining the Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify.

Central to this complex is Voltaire’s conception of liberty. Around this category, Voltaire’s social activism and his relatively rare excursions into systematic philosophy also converged. In 1734, in the wake of the scandals triggered by the Lettres philosophiques , Voltaire wrote, but left unfinished at Cirey, a Traité de metaphysique that explored the question of human freedom in philosophical terms. The question was particularly central to European philosophical discussions at the time, and Voltaire’s work explicitly referenced thinkers like Hobbes and Leibniz while wrestling with the questions of materialism, determinism, and providential purpose that were then central to the writings of the so-called deists, figures such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. The great debate between Samuel Clarke and Leibniz over the principles of Newtonian natural philosophy was also influential as Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of human existence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principles and impersonal laws.

Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians. In his articles “Free Will” and “Liberty,” published in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1752), Voltaire offered a nuanced elaboration of his views on the matter that is useful for specifying the precise details of his complex position. [ 1 ]

Noting how Christian theological notions of grace and the human soul have only shrouded the matter in mystery, Voltaire praises Locke as the first to “find a thread in this labyrinth” (1752 [1900, 142]) in his description of “free will” or “human liberty” as a natural power of mind connected, like all other such powers, to the human passions. As he writes,

the word “liberty,” “free-will,” is … an abstract word, a general word, like beauty, goodness, justice. These terms do not state that all men are always beautiful, good and just; similarly, they are not always free. (143)

Instead, and stressing the deterministic nature of the human passions, Voltaire offers an empirical case to illustrate his view:

It is proposed to you that you mount a horse, you must absolutely make a choice, for it is quite clear that you either will go or that you will not go. There is no middle way. It is therefore of absolute necessity that you wish yes or no. Up to there it is demonstrated that the will is not free. You wish to mount the horse; why? The reason, an ignoramus will say, is because I wish it. This answer is idiotic, nothing happens or can happen without a reason, a cause; there is one therefore for your wish. What is it? the agreeable idea of going on horseback which presents itself in your brain, the dominant idea, the determinant idea. But, you will say, can I not resist an idea which dominates me? No, for what would be the cause of your resistance? None. By your will you can obey only an idea which will dominate you more. (142–143)

In this sense, Voltaire concludes, the will is never free from the deterministic powers that drive the passions and motivate our conduct.

Yet standing against those that leave the matter there by concluding that there is no liberty in human action at all, Voltaire adopts a more nuanced understanding. Asserting that the word “liberty” means “to be able,” and must be distinguished from the word “wish,” which means “to desire,” it is essential that we understand that “to will is to wish, and to be free is to be able” (142). For any choice to be an exercise of “free will,” therefore, it must be a choice enabled by the deterministic power to act, or, to use his terms, the power that makes us able to realize the wish. A human wish, or desire, alone is impotent unless it acts with a power capable of acting in the world. “What is this power,” Voltaire asks? “It is the effect of the constitution and present state of our organs,” he responds, stressing again the deterministic physiological character of this power in human being (144).

But this is not to say that free human action is a complete illusion, a principle that is essential for Voltaire to maintain since it anchors his belief that humans are free moral actors capable, if properly self-governed, of avoiding vice and achieving virtue. To illustrate, he offers the following case:

Is a vigorous young man, madly in love, who holds his willing mistress in his arms, free to tame his passion? Undoubtedly not. He has the power of enjoying, and has not the power of refraining.… When is it that this young man can refrain despite the violence of his passion? When a stronger idea determines in a contrary sense the activity of his body and his soul. (144)

This is the opening he needs to assert his fundamental moral principle regarding human ethical choice within a physically determined world. Let us imagine that that our passionate lover experiences a strong wish to consummate his love sexually, but before acting a powerful counter power emerges telling him that this act will cause horrible pain and harm to his mistress. In this case, the countervailing power can push the man toward restraining his sexual urges, a scenario that also suggests a Lockean program of moral education designed to create a reservoir of morally uplifting experiences that inculcates in the organs of the body a broad array of morally righteous powers orienting our actions toward the good.

Answering in this way the charge that such a view reduces human moral conduct to the level of animals and to a machine-like determinism, Voltaire counters by offering an example of how human moral conduct can be improved even if the solution can only be achieved through a physiological altering of the powers motivating our sensate experience of morally righteous actions. “If a brigand is executed,” Voltaire theorizes, “his accomplice who sees him expire has the liberty of not being frightened at the punishment,” a response which means that his organs are not generating horror at that spectacle. If his will is determined by this absence of horror, the accomplice very well might go from the scaffold to assassinate on the highway again. “But if the organs of the accomplice are stricken with horror,” Voltaire concludes, “and make him experience an unconquerable terror, he will stop robbing” (144).

The brigand’s punishment therefore becomes useful to the accomplice and “an insurance for society only so long as his will is not free” (145). Or, to state the same conclusion another way: humans can transform the physiological determinisms driving their conduct through a program of moral education, which is to say that while the human will is not free, it is not completely and irredeemably determined by blind external forces or incapable of righteous transformation either.

This stance distanced Voltaire from more radical deists like Toland, and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitist understanding of the role of religion in society. For Voltaire, those equipped to develop their own reason could find the proper motivations free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order. This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas.

In the Lettres philosophiques , Voltaire had revealed his sympathy with a deterministic understanding of the human passions, especially in his letter on Locke, which emphasized the materialist reading of the Lockean soul that was then a popular figure in radical philosophical discourse. Some readers singled out this part of the book as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein the very materialist account of “ Âme ,” or the soul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie , was also a flashpoint of controversy. Voltaire also defined his own understanding of the soul in similar terms in his own Dictionnaire philosophique , as is noted above. What these examples point to is Voltaire’s willingness, even eagerness, to publicly defend controversial views even when his own, more private and more considered writings often complicated the understanding that his more public and polemical writings insisted upon. In these cases, one often sees Voltaire setting aside carefully reasoned explanations of complex philosophical problems so as to assert his political conviction that liberty of speech, no matter what the topic, is sacred and cannot be violated.

Voltaire never actually said “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet the myth that associates this dictum with his name remains very powerful, and one still hears his legacy invoked through the redeclaration of this pronouncement that he never actually declared. Part of the deep cultural tie that joins Voltaire to this dictum is the fact that even while he did not write these precise words, they do capture, however imprecisely, the spirit of his philosophy of liberty. In his voluminous correspondence especially, and in the details of many of his more polemical public texts, one does find Voltaire articulating a view of intellectual and civil liberty that makes him an unquestioned forerunner of modern civil libertarianism. He never authored any single philosophical treatise on this topic, however, yet the memory of his life and philosophical campaigns was influential in advancing these ideas nevertheless. Voltaire’s influence is palpably present, for example, in Kant’s famous argument in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” that Enlightenment stems from the free and public use of critical reason, and from the liberty that allows such critical debate to proceed untrammeled. The absence of a singular text that anchors this linkage in Voltaire’s collected works in no way removes the unmistakable presence of Voltaire’s influence upon Kant’s formulation.

Voltaire’s notion of liberty also anchored his hedonistic morality, another key feature of Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. One vehicle for this philosophy was Voltaire’s salacious poetry, a genre that both reflected in its eroticism and sexual innuendo the lived culture of libertinism that was an important feature of Voltaire’s biography. But Voltaire also contributed to philosophical libertinism and hedonism through his celebration of moral freedom through sexual liberty. Voltaire’s avowed hedonism became a central feature of his wider philosophical identity since his libertine writings and conduct were always invoked by those who wanted to indict him for being a reckless subversive devoted to undermining legitimate social order. Voltaire’s refusal to defer to such charges, and his vigor in opposing them through a defense of the very libertinism that was used against him, also injected a positive philosophical program into these public struggles that was very influential. In particular, through his cultivation of a happily libertine persona, and his application of philosophical reason toward the moral defense of this identity, often through the widely accessible vehicles of poetry and witty prose, Voltaire became a leading force in the wider Enlightenment articulation of a morality grounded in the positive valuation of personal, and especially bodily, pleasure, and an ethics rooted in a hedonistic calculus of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. He also advanced this cause by sustaining an unending attack upon the repressive and, to his mind, anti-human demands of traditional Christian asceticism, especially priestly celibacy, and the moral codes of sexual restraint and bodily self-abnegation that were still central to the traditional moral teachings of the day.

This same hedonistic ethics was also crucial to the development of liberal political economy during the Enlightenment, and Voltaire applied his own libertinism toward this project as well. In the wake of the scandals triggered by Mandeville’s famous argument in The Fable of the Bees (a poem, it should be remembered) that the pursuit of private vice, namely greed, leads to public benefits, namely economic prosperity, a French debate about the value of luxury as a moral good erupted that drew Voltaire’s pen. In the 1730s, he drafted a poem called Le Mondain that celebrated hedonistic worldly living as a positive force for society, and not as the corrupting element that traditional Christian morality held it to be. In his Essay sur les moeurs he also joined with other Enlightenment historians in celebrating the role of material acquisition and commerce in advancing the progress of civilization. Adam Smith would famously make similar arguments in his founding tract of Enlightenment liberalism, On the Wealth of Nations , published in 1776. Voltaire was certainly no great contributor to the political economic science that Smith practiced, but he did contribute to the wider philosophical campaigns that made the concepts of liberty and hedonistic morality central to their work both widely known and more generally accepted.

The ineradicable good of personal and philosophical liberty is arguably the master theme in Voltaire’s philosophy, and if it is, then two other themes are closely related to it. One is the importance of skepticism, and the second is the importance of empirical science as a solvent to dogmatism and the pernicious authority it engenders.

Voltaire’s skepticism descended directly from the neo-Pyrrhonian revival of the Renaissance, and owes a debt in particular to Montaigne, whose essays wedded the stance of doubt with the positive construction of a self grounded in philosophical skepticism. Pierre Bayle’s skepticism was equally influential, and what Voltaire shared with these forerunners, and what separated him from other strands of skepticism, such as the one manifest in Descartes, is the insistence upon the value of the skeptical position in its own right as a final and complete philosophical stance. Among the philosophical tendencies that Voltaire most deplored, in fact, were those that he associated most powerfully with Descartes who, he believed, began in skepticism but then left it behind in the name of some positive philosophical project designed to eradicate or resolve it. Such urges usually led to the production of what Voltaire liked to call “philosophical romances,” which is to say systematic accounts that overcome doubt by appealing to the imagination and its need for coherent explanations. Such explanations, Voltaire argued, are fictions, not philosophy, and the philosopher needs to recognize that very often the most philosophical explanation of all is to offer no explanation at all.

Such skepticism often acted as bulwark for Voltaire’s defense of liberty since he argued that no authority, no matter how sacred, should be immune to challenge by critical reason. Voltaire’s views on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, and based on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to call Voltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one accepts a broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. But even if his personal religious views were subtle, Voltaire was unwavering in his hostility to church authority and the power of the clergy. For similar reasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward the sacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocratic society based their authority. In these cases, Voltaire’s skepticism was harnessed to his libertarian convictions through his continual effort to use critical reason as a solvent for these “superstitions” and the authority they anchored. The philosophical authority of romanciers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz was similarly subjected to the same critique, and here one sees how the defense of skepticism and liberty, more than any deeply held opposition to religiosity per se, was often the most powerful motivator for Voltaire.

From this perspective, Voltaire might fruitfully be compared with Socrates, another founding figure in Western philosophy who made a refusal to declaim systematic philosophical positions a central feature of his philosophical identity. Socrates’s repeated assertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaire’s insistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to know and then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Voltaire was also, like Socrates, a public critic and controversialist who defined philosophy primarily in terms of its power to liberate individuals from domination at the hands of authoritarian dogmatism and irrational prejudice. Yet while Socrates championed rigorous philosophical dialectic as the agent of this emancipation, Voltaire saw this same dialectical rationalism at the heart of the dogmatism that he sought to overcome. Voltaire often used satire, mockery and wit to undermine the alleged rigor of philosophical dialectic, and while Socrates saw this kind of rhetorical word play as the very essence of the erroneous sophism that he sought to alleviate, Voltaire cultivated linguistic cleverness as a solvent to the false and deceptive dialectic that anchored traditional philosophy.

Against the acceptance of ignorance that rigorous skepticism often demanded, and against the false escape from it found in sophistical knowledge—or what Voltaire called imaginative philosophical romances—Voltaire offered a different solution than the rigorous dialectical reasoning of Socrates: namely, the power and value of careful empirical science. Here one sees the debt that Voltaire owed to the currents of Newtonianism that played such a strong role in launching his career. Voltaire’s own critical discourse against imaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with English and Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots, who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles with Leibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations of Newtonian natural philosophy. In his Principia Mathematica (1687; 2 nd rev. edition 1713), Newton had offered a complete mathematical and empirical description of how celestial and terrestrial bodies behaved. Yet when queried about how his philosophy explained the physical causes that led bodies to act in the way that he mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newton famously avoided the question, responding in one oft-cited passage “I feign no hypotheses.” From the perspective of traditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand waving since offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies in motion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences. Newton’s major philosophical innovation rested, however, in challenging this very epistemological foundation, and the assertion and defense of Newton’s position against its many critics, not least by Voltaire, became arguably the central dynamic of philosophical change in the first half of the eighteenth century.

While Newtonian epistemology admitted of many variations, at its core rested a new skepticism about the validity of apriori rationalist accounts of nature and a new assertion of brute empirical fact as a valid philosophical understanding in its own right. European Natural philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century had thrown out the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle with its four part causality and teleological understanding of bodies, motion and the cosmic order. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. This approach lead to the vortical account of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to be swimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects in the manner we observe. What could not be observed, however, was the ethereal sea itself, or the other agents of this supposedly comprehensive mechanical cosmos. Yet rationality nevertheless dictated that such mechanisms must exist since without them philosophy would be returned to the occult causes of the Aristotelian natural tendencies and teleological principles. Figuring out what these point-contact mechanisms were and how they worked was, therefore, the charge of the new mechanical natural philosophy of the late seventeenth century. Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established their scientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal.

Newton pointed natural philosophy in a new direction. He offered mathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as the new foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. From this perspective, the great error of both Aristotelian and the new mechanical natural philosophy was its failure to adhere strictly enough to empirical facts. Vortical mechanics, for example, claimed that matter was moved by the action of an invisible agent, yet this, the Newtonians began to argue, was not to explain what is really happening but to imagine a fiction that gives us a speciously satisfactory rational explanation of it. Natural philosophy needs to resist the allure of such rational imaginings and to instead deal only with the empirically provable. Moreover, the Newtonians argued, if a set of irrefutable facts cannot be explained other then by accepting the brute facticity of their truth, this is not a failure of philosophical explanation so much as a devotion to appropriate rigor. Such epistemological battles became especially intense around Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Few questioned that Newton had demonstrated an irrefutable mathematical law whereby bodies appear to attract one another in relation to their masses and in inverse relation to the square of the distance between them. But was this rigorous mathematical and empirical description a philosophical account of bodies in motion? Critics such as Leibniz said no, since mathematical description was not the same thing as philosophical explanation, and Newton refused to offer an explanation of how and why gravity operated the way that it did. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. They further insisted that it was enough that gravity did operate the way that Newton said it did, and that this was its own justification for accepting his theory. They further mocked those who insisted on dreaming up chimeras like the celestial vortices as explanations for phenomena when no empirical evidence existed to support of such theories.

The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonian position in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades of the eighteenth century. It also describes Voltaire’s own stance in these same battles. His contribution, therefore, was not centered on any innovation within these very familiar Newtonian themes; rather, it was his accomplishment to become a leading evangelist for this new Newtonian epistemology, and by consequence a major reason for its widespread dissemination and acceptance in France and throughout Europe. A comparison with David Hume’s role in this same development might help to illuminate the distinct contributions of each. Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism about rationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion that made empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy. Yet Hume’s target remained traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point of denying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. This argument would famously awake Kant’s dogmatic slumbers and lead to the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, but Voltaire had different fish to fry. His attachment was to the new Newtonian empirical scientists, and while he was never more than a dilettante scientist himself, his devotion to this form of natural inquiry made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocate and ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception of philosophy that Newton initiated.

For Voltaire (and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians) the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy. This involved sharing in Hume’s critique of abstract rationalist systems, but it also involved the very different project of defending empirical induction and experimental reasoning as the new epistemology appropriate for a modern Enlightened philosophy. In particular, Voltaire fought vigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used to challenge Newtonian reasoning. His famous conclusion in Candide , for example, that optimism was a philosophical chimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from brute empirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions. His alternative offered in the same text of a life devoted to simple tasks with clear, tangible, and most importantly useful ends was also derived from the utilitarian discourse that Newtonians also used to justify their science. Voltaire’s campaign on behalf of smallpox inoculation, which began with his letter on the topic in the Lettres philosophiques , was similarly grounded in an appeal to the facts of the case as an antidote to the fears generated by logical deductions from seemingly sound axiomatic principles. All of Voltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact as the ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence to preexisting understandings. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism.

Voltaire also contributed directly to the new relationship between science and philosophy that the Newtonian revolution made central to Enlightenment modernity. Especially important was his critique of metaphysics and his argument that it be eliminated from any well-ordered science. At the center of the Newtonian innovations in natural philosophy was the argument that questions of body per se were either irrelevant to, or distracting from, a well focused natural science. Against Leibniz, for example, who insisted that all physics begin with an accurate and comprehensive conception of the nature of bodies as such, Newton argued that the character of bodies was irrelevant to physics since this science should restrict itself to a quantified description of empirical effects only and resist the urge to speculate about that which cannot be seen or measured. This removal of metaphysics from physics was central to the overall Newtonian stance toward science, but no one fought more vigorously for it, or did more to clarify the distinction and give it a public audience than Voltaire.

The battles with Leibnizianism in the 1740s were the great theater for Voltaire’s work in this regard. In 1740, responding to Du Châtelet’s efforts in her Institutions de physiques to reconnect metaphysics and physics through a synthesis of Leibniz with Newton, Voltaire made his opposition to such a project explicit in reviews and other essays he published. He did the same during the brief revival of the so-called “vis viva controversy” triggered by du Châtelet’s treatise, defending the empirical and mechanical conception of body and force against those who defended Leibniz’s more metaphysical conception of the same thing. In the same period, Voltaire also composed a short book entitled La Metaphysique de Newton , publishing it in 1740 as an implicit counterpoint to Châtelet’s Institutions . This tract did not so much articulate Newton’s metaphysics as celebrate the fact that he avoided practicing such speculations altogether. It also accused Leibniz of becoming deluded by his zeal to make metaphysics the foundation of physics. In the definitive 1745 edition of his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton , Voltaire also appended his tract on Newton’s metaphysics as the book’s introduction, thus framing his own understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and empirical science in direct opposition to Châtelet’s Leibnizian understanding of the same. He also added personal invective and satire to this same position in his indictment of Maupertuis in the 1750s, linking Maupertuis’s turn toward metaphysical approaches to physics in the 1740s with his increasingly deluded philosophical understanding and his authoritarian manner of dealing with his colleagues and critics.

While Voltaire’s attacks on Maupertuis crossed the line into ad hominem , at their core was a fierce defense of the way that metaphysical reasoning both occludes and deludes the work of the physical scientist. Moreover, to the extent that eighteenth-century Newtonianism provoked two major trends in later philosophy, first the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy à la Kant through his “Copernican Revolution” that relocated the remains of metaphysics in the a priori categories of reason, and second, the marginalization of metaphysics altogether through the celebration of philosophical positivism and the anti-speculative scientific method that anchored it, Voltaire should be seen as a major progenitor of the latter. By also attaching what many in the nineteenth century saw as Voltaire’s proto-positivism to his celebrated campaigns to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority through the debunking of the “irrational superstitions” that appeared to anchor such authority, Voltaire’s legacy also cemented the alleged linkage that joined positivist science on the one hand with secularizing disenchantment and dechristianization on the other. In this way, Voltaire should be seen as the initiator of a philosophical tradition that runs from him to Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin, and then on to Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins in the twentieth century.

Because of Voltaire’s celebrity, efforts to collect and canonize his writings began immediately after his death, and still continue today. The result has been the production of three major collections of his writings including his vast correspondence, the last unfinished. Together these constitute the authoritative corpus of Voltaire’s written work.

• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire , edited by A. Beuchot. 72 vols. Paris: Lefevre, 1829–1840.
• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire , edited by L.E.D. Moland and G. Bengesco. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1885.
• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire , edited by Theodore Besterman. 135 vols. (projected) Geneva, Banbury, and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–.

Collections of Writings

• The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version , William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), 21 vols., New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty ]
• The Portable Voltaire , Ben Ray Redman (ed.), New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Selected Works of Voltaire , Joseph McCabe (ed.), London: Watts, 2007.
• Shorter Writings of Voltaire , J.I. Rodale (ed.), New York: A.S. Barnes, 1960.
• Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of his Correspondence , S.G. Tallentyre (tr.), Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2004.
• Voltaire on Religion: Selected Writings , Kenneth W. Applegate (ed.), New York: F. Ungar, 1974.
• Voltaire: Selected Writings , Christopher Thacker (ed.), London: Dent, 1995.
• Voltaire: Selections , Paul Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan, 1989.
• Translations of Voltaire’s major plays are found in: The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version , William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty ]
• Seven Plays (Mérope (1737), Olympia (1761), Alzire (1734), Orestes (1749), Oedipus (1718), Zaire, Caesar) , William Fleming (tr.), New York: Howard Fertig, 1988.
• The Age of Louis XIV (1733) and other Selected Writings , J.H. Brumfitt (ed.), New York: Twayne, 1963.
• The Age of Louis XIV (1733) , Martyn P. Pollack (tr.), London and New York: Dutton, 1978.
• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727) , Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727) , Antonia White and Ragnhild Marie Hatton (eds.), New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.
• The Philosophy of History (1764) , New York: The Philosophical Library, 1965.

Essays, Letters, and Stories

• Vol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760).
• Vol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors (1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An Indian Adventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).
• Vol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The World as it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin (1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772), Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).
• The English Essays of 1727 , David Williams and Richard Walker (eds.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996.
• Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia (1738) , Glasgow, 1967.
• The History of the Travels of Scarmentado (1756) , Glasgow: The College Press, 1969.
• Micromégas and other Short Fictions (1738), Theo Cuffe and Haydn Mason (eds.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
• The Princess of Babylon (1768) , London: Signet Books, 1969.
• The Virgin of Orleans, or Joan of Arc (1755) , Howard Nelson (tr.), Denver: A. Swallow, 1965.
• Voltaire. Essay on Milton (1727) , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
• Voltaire’s Romances , New York: P. Eckler, 1986.
• Zadig, or L’Ingénu (1757), London: Penguin Books, 1984.
• Zadig, or the Book of Fate (1757) , New York: Garland, 1974.
• Zadig, or The Book of Fate an Oriental History (1757) , Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982.
• The Calas Affair: A Treatise on Tolerance (1762) , Brian Masters (ed.), London: The Folio Society, 1994.
• The Sermon of the Fifty (1759) , J.A.R. Séguin (ed.), Jersey City, NJ: R. Paxton, 1963.
• A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays , Joseph McCabe (ed.), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.
• A Treatise on Tolerance and other Writings , edited by Brian Masters, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994
• Voltaire. Political Writings , edited by David Williams, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994

Editions of Major Individual Works

• Translated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.
• Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.
• Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
• Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.
• Philosophical Dictionary: A Compendium , Wade Baskin (ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
• Philosophical Dictionary: Selections , Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1965.
• Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary , Clarence L. Barnhart (ed.), New York: Carlton House, 1900.
• John Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.
• Leonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
• Ernest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.
• Nicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• F.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.
• Harvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [ Available online from Bartleby.com ]
• Voltaire’s Letters on the Quakers (1727) , Philadelphia: William H. Allen, 1953.
• C.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.
• Candide and other Writings , Haskell M. Block (ed.), New York: Modern Library, 1985.
• Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York: Modern Library, 1992.
• Shane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.
• Candide: A Dual Language Book , New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.
• Robert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
• Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available online at Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project ]
• Daniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
• Candide and Related Texts , David Wooton (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.
• Lowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.
• Candide & Zadig , Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket Books, 2005.
• Raffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
• Theo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
• Candide and other Stories , Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories , Donald Frame (tr. and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.

The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger every day. The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted to scholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed. The Voltaire Foundation’s series Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century changed its name in 2013 to Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment . The original series published over 450 volumes, many related to Voltaire, and while the new title reflects a change toward a broader publishing agenda, it remains, along with Cahier Voltaire published by La Fondation Voltaire à Ferney, the best periodical source for new scholarship on Voltaire.

• Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 1975, Voltaire and the Century of Light , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Badinter, Elizabeth, 1983, Émilie, Émilie, l’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: Flammarion.
• –––, 1999–2002, Les Passions intellectuelles , 2 volumes, Paris: Fayard.
• Barber, W.H., 1955, Leibniz in France from Arnauld to Voltaire: A Study in French Reactions to Leibnizianism 1670–1760 , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Barrell, Rex A., 1988, Bolingbroke and France , Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
• Besterman, Theodore, 1969, Voltaire , New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.
• Bird, Stephen, 2000, Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-century France , Oxford: Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment.
• Brooks, Richard A., 1964, Voltaire and Leibniz , Geneva: Droz.
• Brown, Harcourt, 1947, Voltaire and the Royal Society of London , Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly.
• Brumfitt, J.H., 1970, Voltaire: historian , London: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1973, The French Enlightenment , Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co.
• Brunel, Lucien, 1967, Les Philosophes et l’académie française au dix-huitième siècle , Genève: Slatkine Reprints.
• Brunet, Pierre, 1931, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: A. Blanchard.
• Collins, J. Churton, 1908, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England , London: E. Nash.
• Conlon, Pierre M., 1961, Voltaire’s literary career from 1728 to 1750 , Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.
• Cottret, Bernard, 1992, Bolingbroke: exil et écriture au siècle des Lumières , Paris: Klincksieck.
• Cronk, Nicolas, 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2014, Voltaire: a very short introduction , Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation.
• Darnton, Robert, 1979, The Business of Enlightenment: The Publishing History of the Encyclopédie , 1775–1800, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1982, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Dickinson, H.T., 1970, Bolingbroke , London: Constable.
• Dieckmann, Herbert, 1943, Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretations , (Washington University Studies, New Series, Language and Literature, no. 18), St. Louis: Washington University Press.
• Duchet, Michèle, 1971, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot , Paris: F. Maspero.
• Ehrman, Esther, 1986, Mme. du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment , Leamington [Spa]: Berg.
• Gandt, François de, 2001, Cirey dans la vie intellectuelle: la réception de Newton en France , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Gardiner Janik, Linda, 1982, “Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Mme. Du Châtelet’s Institutions de physiques , 1737–1740”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , 201: 85–113.
• Gay, Peter, 1954, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment , New York: Knopf.
• –––, 1959, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• –––, 1969, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 1: The Science of Freedom ), New York: Knopf.
• –––, 1977, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 2: The Rise of Modern Paganism ), New York: Knopf.
• Guerlac, Henry, 1981, Newton on the Continent , Ithaca.
• Gurrado, Antonio, 2013, Voltaire cattolico , Torino: Lindau.
• Hagengruber, Ruth (ed.), 2011, Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton , Dordrecht: Springer.
• Ḥadīd, Javādī, 2012, Voltaire et l’Islam , Ozoir la Ferriere : Albouraq.
• Hellman, Lilian, 1980, Dorothy Parker, John La Touche, Richard Wilbur, and Leonard Bernstein, 1956–1957, Candide, An Operetta in Two Acts , New York: Jaini Publications.
• Hutchison, Ross, 1991, Locke in France: 1688–1734 , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Iltis, Carolyn, 1977, “Madame du Châtelet’s metaphysics and mechanics”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science , 8: 29–48.
• Israel, Jonathan, 2000, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2009, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2014, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Jacob, Margaret, 1981, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans , London: Cornerstone Book Publishers.
• James, E. D., 1978, “Voltaire on the Nature of the Soul”, French Studies , 32: 20–33.
• –––, 1980, “Voltaire and Malebranche: from Sensationalism to ‘tout en Dieu’”, Modern Language Review , 75: 282–90.
• –––, 1984, “Voltaire and the Ethics of Spinoza”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , 228: 67–87.
• –––, 1987, “Voltaire on Free Will”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , 249: 1–18.
• Kramnick, Isaac, 1968, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Lanson, Gustave, 1894, Histoire de la littérature française , Paris: Hachette.
• –––, 1906, Voltaire , Paris: Hachette.
• Libby, Margaret Sherwood, 1935, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences , New York: Columbia University Press, 1935.
• Lilti, Antoine, 2005, Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: Fayard.
• Mason, Haydn Trevor, 1963, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire , London: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1975, Voltaire , New York: St. Martin’s.
• Masseau, Didier, 1994, L’Invention de l’intellectual dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Mattei, Silvia, 2010, Voltaire et les voyages de la raison , Paris: Harmattan.
• Maurois, André, 1935, Voltaire , Paris: Gallimard.
• Mauzi, Robert, 1960, L’idée du bonheur dans la litterature et la pensée francaises au XVIIIe siècle , Paris: A. Colin.
• McKenna, Antony, 1994, Écraser l’infame, 1759–1770 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 4), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• McMahon, Darrin M., 2001, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-enlightenment and the Making of Modernity , New York: Oxford University Press.
• McNutt, Jennifer Powell, 2013, Calvin meets Voltaire: the clergy of Geneva in the age of enlightenment, 1685–1798 , Burlington: Ashgate.
• Melton, James Van Horn, 2001, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Méricam-Bourdet, Myrtille, 2012, Voltaire et l’écriture de l’histoire: un enjeu politique , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Mervaud, Christiane, 1991, De la cour au jardin, 1750–1759 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 3), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Mitchell, Harvey, 2104, Voltaire’s Jews and modern Jewish identity: rethinking the Enlightenment , London: Routledge.
• Morize, André, 1909, L’Apologie du luxe au XVIIIe Siècle: “Le Mondain” et ses Sources , Paris: H. Didier.
• Neiertz, Patrick, 2012, Voltaire et l’économie politique , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Northeast, Catherine M., 1991, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762 , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Orieux, Jean, 1966, Voltaire, ou la Royauté de l’esprit , Paris: Flammarion.
• Palmer, Robert R., 1939, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18 th Century France , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Pappas, John N., 1957, Berthier’s Journal de Trevoux and the Philosophes (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Volume 3), Geneva: Institut and Musée Voltaire.
• –––, 1962, Voltaire and d’Alembert , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Pearson, Roger, 1993, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s “Contes philosophiques” , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2005, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom , London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Perry, Norma, 1975, Sir Everard Fawkener, friend and correspondent of Voltaire , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Pettit, Alexander, 1997, Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Responses to Walpole, 1730–1737 , Newark: University of Delaware Press.
• Pomeau, René, 1969, La réligion de Voltaire , Paris: Nizet.
• –––, 1985, D’Arouet à Voltaire, 1694–1734 , Voltaire en son temps (Volume 1), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Château de Cirey , (Champagne, France), Residence of Voltaire.
• Institut et Musée Voltaire , Geneva.
• La Société Voltaire .
• The Voltaire Foundation , Oxford University.
• The Best Voltaire Books , recommended by Nicholas Cronk.

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The Life and Work of Voltaire, French Enlightenment Writer

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Born François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778) was a writer and philosopher of the French Enlightenment period . He was an incredibly prolific writer, advocating for civil freedoms and criticizing major institutions such as the Catholic Church.

Fast Facts: Voltaire

• Full Name : François-Marie Arouet
• Occupation : Writer, poet, and philosopher
• Born : November 21, 1694 in Paris, France
• Died : May 30, 1778 in Paris, France
• Parents: François Arouet and Marie Marguerite Daumard
• Key Accomplishments : Voltaire published significant criticism of the French monarchy. His commentary on religious tolerance, historiographies, and civil liberties became a key component of Enlightenment thinking.

Voltaire was the fifth child and fourth son of François Arouet and his wife Marie Marguerite Daumard. The Arouet family had already lost two sons, Armand-François and Robert, in infancy, and Voltaire (then François-Marie) was nine years younger than his surviving brother, Armand, and seven years younger than his sole sister, Marguerite-Catherine. François Arouet was a lawyer and a treasury official; their family was part of the French nobility , but at the lowest possible rank. Later in life, Voltaire claimed to be the illegitimate son of a higher-ranked nobleman by the name of Guérin de Rochebrune.

His early education came from the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. From the age of ten until seventeen, Voltaire received classical instruction in Latin, rhetoric , and theology. Once he left school, he decided he wanted to become a writer, much to the dismay of his father, who wanted Voltaire to follow him into the law. Voltaire also continued learning outside the confines of formal education. He developed his writing talents and also became multilingual, attaining fluency in English, Italian, and Spanish in addition to his native French.

First Career and Early Romance

After leaving school, Voltaire moved to Paris. He pretended to be working as an assistant to a notary, theoretically as a stepping stone into the legal profession. In reality, though, he was actually spending most of his time writing poetry. After a time, his father found out the truth and sent him away from Paris to study law in Caen, Normandy.

Even this did not deter Voltaire from continuing to write. He merely switched over from poetry to writing studies on history and essays. During this period, the witty style of writing and speaking that made Voltaire so popular first appeared in his work, and it endeared him to many of the higher-ranking nobles he spent time around.

In 1713, with his father’s assistance, Voltaire began working at the Hague in the Netherlands as a secretary to the French ambassador, the marquis de Châteauneuf. While there, Voltaire had his earliest known romantic entanglement, falling in love with a Huguenot refugee, Catherine Olympe Dunoyer. Unfortunately, their connection was considered unsuitable and caused something of a scandal, so the marquis forced Voltaire to break it off and return to France. By this point, his political and legal career had all but been given up.

Playwright and Government Critic

Upon returning to Paris, Voltaire launched his writing career. Since his favorite topics were critiques of the government and satires of political figures, he landed in hot water pretty quickly. One early satire, which accused the Duke of Orleans of incest, even landed him in prison in the Bastille for nearly a year. Upon his release, however, his debut play (a take on the Oedipus myth ) was produced, and it was a critical and commercial success. The Duke whom he had previously offended even presented him with a medal in recognition of the achievement.

It was around this time that François-Marie Arouet began going by the pseudonym Voltaire, under which he would publish most of his works. To this day, there’s much debate as to how he came up with the name. It may have its roots as an anagram or pun on his family name or several different nicknames. Voltaire reportedly adopted the name in 1718, after being released from the Bastille. After his release, he also struck up a new romance with a young widow, Marie-Marguerite de Rupelmonde.

Unfortunately, Voltaire’s next works did not have nearly the same success as his first. His play Artémire flopped so badly that even the text itself only survives in a few fragments, and when he tried to publish an epic poem about King Henry IV (the first Bourbon dynasty monarch), he couldn’t find a publisher in France. Instead, he and Rupelmonde journeyed to the Netherlands, where he secured a publisher in The Hague. Eventually, Voltaire convinced a French publisher to publish the poem, La Henriade , secretly. The poem was a success, as was his next play, which was performed at the wedding of Louis XV.

In 1726, Voltaire became involved in a quarrel with a young nobleman who reportedly insulted Voltaire’s change of name. Voltaire challenged him to a duel, but the nobleman instead had Voltaire beaten, then arrested without a trial. He was, however, able to negotiate with authorities to be exiled to England rather than imprisoned at the Bastille again.

English Exile

As it turns out, Voltaire’s exile to England would change his entire outlook. He moved in the same circles as some of the leading figures of English society, thought, and culture, including Jonathan Swift , Alexander Pope, and more. In particular, he became fascinated by the government of England in comparison with France: England was a constitutional monarchy , whereas France still lived under an absolute monarchy . The country also had greater freedoms of speech and religion, which would become a key component of Voltaire’s criticisms and writings.

Voltaire was able to return to France after a little more than two years, though still banned from the court at Versailles. Thanks to participation in a plan to literally purchase the French lottery, along with an inheritance from his father, he quickly became incredibly rich. In the early 1730s, he began publishing work that showed his clear English influences. His play Zaïre was dedicated to his English friend Everard Fawkener and included praise of English culture and freedoms. He also published a collection of essays that praised British politics, attitudes towards religion and science, and arts and literature, called the  Letters Concerning the English Nation , in 1733 in London. The next year, it was published in French, landing Voltaire in hot water again. Because he did not get the approval of the official royal censor before publishing, and because the essays praised British religious freedom and human rights, the book was banned and Voltaire had to quickly flee from Paris.

In 1733, Voltaire also met the most significant romantic partner of his life: Émilie, the Marquise du Châtelet, a mathematician who was married to the Marquis du Châtelet. Despite being 12 years younger than Voltaire (and married, and a mother), Émilie was very much an intellectual peer to Voltaire. They amassed a shared collection of over 20,000 books and spent time studying and performing experiments together, many of which were inspired by Voltaire’s admiration of Sir Isaac Newton . After the Letters scandal, Voltaire fled to the estate belonging to her husband. Voltaire paid to renovate the building, and her husband did not raise any fuss about the affair, which would continue for 16 years.

Somewhat abashed by his multiple conflicts with the government, Voltaire began keeping a lower profile, although he continued his writing, now focused on history and science. The Marquise du Châtelet contributed considerably alongside him, producing a definitive French translation of Newton’s Principia and writing reviews of Voltaire’s Newton-based work. Together, they were instrumental in introducing Newton’s work in France. They also developed some critical views on religion, with Voltaire publishing several texts that sharply criticized the establishment of state religions, religious intolerance, and even organized religion as a whole. Similarly, he railed against the style of histories and biographies of the past, suggesting they were filled with falsehoods and supernatural explanations and needed a fresh, more scientific and evidence-based approach to research.

Connections in Prussia

Frederick the Great , while he was still just the crown prince of Prussia, began a correspondence with Voltaire around 1736, but they did not meet in person until 1740. Despite their friendship, Voltaire still went to Frederick’s court in 1743 as a French spy to report back on Frederick’s intentions and capabilities with regards to the ongoing War of Austrian Succession.

By the mid-1740s, Voltaire’s romance with the Marquise du Châtelet had begun to wind down. He grew tired of spending nearly all his time at her estate, and both found new companionship. In Voltaire’s case, it was even more scandalous than their affair had been: he was attracted to, and later lived with, his own niece, Marie Louise Mignot. In 1749, the Marquise died in childbirth, and Voltaire moved to Prussia the following year.

During the 1750s, Voltaire’s relationships in Prussia began to deteriorate. He was accused of theft and forgery relating to some bond investments, then had a feud with the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences that ended with Voltaire writing a satire that angered Frederick the Great and resulted in the temporary destruction of their friendship. They would, however, reconcile in the 1760s .

Geneva, Paris, and Final Years

Forbidden by King Louis XV to return to Paris, Voltaire instead arrived in Geneva in 1755. He continued publishing, with major philosophical writings such as Candide, or Optimism , a satire of Leibniz's philosophy of optimistic determinism which would become Voltaire’s most famous work.

Starting in 1762, Voltaire took up the causes of unjustly persecuted people, particularly those who were victims of religious persecution. Among his most notable causes was the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot who was convicted of murdering his son for wanting to convert to Catholicism and tortured to death; his property was confiscated and his daughters forced into Catholic convents. Voltaire, along with others, strongly doubted his guilt and suspected a case of religious persecution. The conviction was overturned in 1765.

Voltaire’s last year was still full of activity. In early 1778, he was initiated into Freemasonry , and historians dispute as to whether he did so at the urging of Benjamin Franklin or not. He also returned to Paris for the first time in a quarter century to see his latest play, Irene , open. He fell ill on the journey and believed himself to be on death’s doorstep, but recovered. Two months later, however, he became ill again and died on May 30, 1778. Accounts of his deathbed vary wildly, depending on the sources and their own opinions of Voltaire. His famous deathbed quote—in which a priest asked him to renounce Satan and he replied “Now is not the time for making new enemies!”—is likely apocryphal and actually traced to a 19 th -century joke that was attributed to Voltaire in the 20 th century.

Voltaire was formally denied a Christian burial because of his criticism of the Church, but his friends and family managed to secretly arrange a burial at the abbey of Scellières in Champagne. He left behind a complicated legacy. For instance, while he argued for religious tolerance, he also was one of the origins of Enlightenment-era anti-Semitism. He endorsed anti-enslavement and anti-monarchical views, but disdained the idea of democracy as well. In the end, Voltaire’s texts became a key component of Enlightenment thinking , which has allowed his philosophy and writing to endure for centuries.

• Pearson, Roger. Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom . Bloomsbury, 2005.
• Pomeau, René Henry. “Voltaire: French Philosopher and Author.” Encyclopaedia Britannica , https://www.britannica.com/biography/Voltaire.
• “Voltaire.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/
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Biography Online

Voltaire Biography

“Love truth, but pardon error.”

– Voltaire

Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing more than 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets. Despite strict censorship laws, he frequently risked large penalties by breaking them and questioning the establishment.

Short Biography of Voltaire

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet, in Paris. He was educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704–1711), becoming fluent in Greek, Latin and the major European languages.

His father tried to encourage Voltaire to become a lawyer, but Voltaire was more interested in becoming a writer. Instead of studying to be a lawyer, he began writing poetry and mild criticisms of the church and state. His humorous, satirical writing made him popular with sections of Paris society, though they also started attracting the attention of the censors.

In 1726, he was exiled to England after being involved in a scuffle with a French nobleman. The nobleman used his wealth to have him arrested, and this would cause Voltaire to try and reform the French judicial system. After this first imprisonment in the Bastilles, he changed his name to Voltaire – signifying his departure from his past. He also used numerous other pen names throughout the course of his life, in a bid to escape censorship.

Voltaire spent three years in England, where he was influenced by British writers, such as William Shakespeare and also the different political system, which saw a constitutional monarchy rather than an absolute monarchy as in France. He also learnt from great scientists, such as Sir Isaac Newton . Voltaire was particularly impressed by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, saying once:

“We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”

Although he had much in common with fellow French Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau , the pair often disagreed and had a prickly relationship. However, after Rousseau wrote Emile / Vicaire Savoyard, Voltaire offered Rousseau a safe haven because he appreciated Rousseau’s attack on religious hypocrisy. Rousseau regretted not replying to Voltaire’s offer.

On returning to France, he wrote letters praising the British system of government and their greater respect for freedom of speech. This enraged the French establishment, and again he was forced to flee Paris.

Seeking a safe place, Voltaire began a collaboration with Marquise du Chatelet. During this time, Voltaire wrote on Newton’s scientific theories and helped to make Newton’s ideas accessible to a much wider section of European society. He also began attacking the church’s relationship with the state. Voltaire argued for the separation of religion and state and also allowing freedom of belief and religious tolerance. Voltaire had a mixed opinion of the Bible and was willing to criticise it. Though not professing a religion, he believed in God, as a matter of reason.

“What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”  On Catholicism

In a letter to Frederick II, King of Prussia, (5 January 1767) he once wrote:

“Ours [religion] is without a doubt the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and the most blood-thirsty ever to infect the world.”

In 1744, Voltaire returned to Paris, where he began a relationship with his niece, Marie Louise Mignot. They remained together until his death.

For a brief time, he was invited by Frederick the Great, to Potsdam. Here, Voltaire wrote more articles of a scientific nature, but later incurred the displeasure of the king as he started satirising the abuses of power within the state.

In 1759, he wrote his best-known work – Candide, ou l’Optimisme ( Candide , or Optimism ) This was a satire on the philosophy of Leibniz. After a brief stay in Geneva, he settled for 20 years in Ferny on the French border.

In his later life, Voltaire continued to write and also to support persecuted religious minorities. He was visited by some of the leading European intellectuals of the day – such as James Boswell and Adam Smith.

In 1778, he died after shortly returning to Paris. Some of his enemies claimed he made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, but this is disputed.

In February of that year, fearing he would die, he wrote:

“I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.”

Voltaire was secretly buried before a pronouncement could be made public.

Three years after his death, on 11 July 1791, he was brought back to Paris to be enshrined in the Pantheon. It is said up to a million people came to see Voltaire – now considered a French hero and fore-runner of the French revolution.

Influence of Voltaire

• Voltaire revolutionised the art of history. He sought to avoid bias and included discussion of social and economic issues, moving away from dry military accounts.
• Voltaire argued for an extension of education, hoping greater literacy would free society from ignorance.
• Voltaire wrote poems and plays, including two epics. Voltaire politicised writing by showing that even poetry and romance could be laced with satire and political polemic. Often it was indirect criticism that was most effective.
• Voltaire was a passionate and persistent critic of those in power who misused their position. By attacking the abuses of the absolute monarchy and church, he paved the way for a less deferential attitude which was a significant underlying cause of the French revolution.
• At a time of religious persecution, Voltaire illustrated how religious dogmas were created by human ignorance and led to needless bloodshed and suffering.
• Voltaire was a key figure of the enlightenment which sought to use a range of scientific and literary books to explain the underlying nature of life. Voltaire believed no one book or dogma could explain everything. But, true understanding required the use of reason and an open mind.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. “ Biography of Voltaire” , Oxford, www.biographyonline.net – 3 February 2013. Last updated 7 February 2018.

Voltaire Quotes

“It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?”

– Voltaire A Treatise on Toleration (1763)

Candide – Voltaire

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Who was Voltaire?

François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known as Voltaire, was a writer, philosopher, poet, dramatist,  historian  and polemicist of the French Enlightenment. The diversity of his literary output is rivalled only by its abundance: the edition of his complete works currently nearing completion will comprise over 200 volumes.

‘The age of Voltaire’ has become synonymous with ‘the Enlightenment’, but although Voltaire’s eminence as a  philosophe  is self-evident, the precise originality of his thought and writings is less easily defined. In this section, you can explore the story of his  life ,  works  and  legacy .

School of Life: Voltaire  – philosopher Alain de Botton has created a short  animated video on Voltaire , scripted by Nicholas Cronk: [embedded video]

Born in Paris into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was a brilliant pupil of the Jesuits. His rejection of his father’s attempts to guide him into a career in the law was sealed in 1718, when he invented a new name for himself: ‘de Voltaire’. Voltaire is an anagram of ‘Arouet l(e) j(eune)’ (in the 18th century,  i  and  j , and  u and  v , were typographically interchangeable). The addition of the aristocratic preposition ‘de’ may be an early sign of his social ambition, but the play on the verb  volter , to turn abruptly, evokes a playful or ‘volatile’ quality which fortells the quick style, pervasive humour and irony that make Voltaire such an important figure in the history of the Enlightenment.

In the same year that he coined his new name, Voltaire enjoyed his first major literary success when his tragedy  Œdipe  was staged by the Comédie Française. Meanwhile he was working on an epic poem which had as its protagonist Henri IV, the much-loved French monarch who brought France’s civil wars to a close, and who, in Voltaire’s treatment, becomes a forerunner of religious toleration:  La Ligue  (later enlarged to become  La Henriade ) was first published in 1723.

VOLTAIRE IN ENGLAND

His reputation as a poet and dramatist was now comfortably established, and he decided to travel to England to oversee the publishing of the definitive edition of  La Henriade . His departure for London was precipitated when he unwisely became involved in a humiliating argument with an aristocrat, who had him briefly interned in the Bastille.

Voltaire arrived in London in the autumn of 1726, and what had begun partly as self-imposed exile became a crucially formative period for him. He learned English and mixed with a number of figures prominent in England’s political and cultural life. An old saw has it that Voltaire ‘came to England a poet and left it a philosopher’. In truth, he was a philosopher before coming to England, and it would be more accurate to say that Voltaire came to England a poet and left it a prose writer. Voltaire thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and during his long life he would never abandon the writing of verse, for which he had a remarkable facility (many of his letters are sprinkled with seemingly spontaneous passages of verse). In England, however, he came into contact with models of prose unlike those to which he was accustomed in France: Swift’s  Gulliver’s Travels , for example, which Voltaire read on first publication, or Addison’s Spectator , a periodical he used in order to learn to read English. It is hardly coincidental, therefore, that before returning to France in 1728, Voltaire began writing his first two major essays in prose: a history, the  Histoire de Charles XII , and a book about the English, which is now best known under the title  Lettres philosophiques , but was first published in English translation (London 1733) as the  Letters Concerning the English Nation .

CIREY AND BERLIN

The furore created by the publication in France in 1734 of the  Lettres philosophiques  led Voltaire to leave Paris and take refuge in the château of his mistress, Mme du Châtelet, at Cirey-en-Champagne. From 1734 until Mme du Châtelet’s death in 1749, this was his haven from the world. During this period, he studied and wrote intensively in a wide variety of areas, including science ( Eléments de la philosophie de Newton , 1738), poetry ( Le Mondain , 1736), drama ( Mahomet , 1741), and fiction ( Zadig , 1747). In the 1740s, Voltaire was briefly on better terms with the court: he was made royal historiographer in 1745, and the following year, after several failed attempts, he was finally elected to the Académie Française. He had turned fifty and was now the leading poet and dramatist of his day; perhaps even Voltaire did not imagine that the works which would make him even more celebrated still lay in the future.

An initially idyllic interlude was provided by Voltaire’s stay at the court of Potsdam (1750-1753), and in 1752 he published both  Le Siècle de Louis XIV  and  Micromégas . Throughout his career, however, Voltaire was prone to involvement in literary quarrels, and his time in Berlin was no exception; his attack on Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy, caused Frederick II to lose patience with him. Voltaire left Berlin in a flurry of mutual recriminations, and although these were later forgotten, Voltaire’s dream of having found the ideal enlightened monarch were definitively shattered. His correspondence with Frederick, which had begun in 1736 when the latter was still crown prince, survived, and, after a hiatus, it continued until Voltaire’s death. They corresponded on literary and philosophical matters, and Voltaire sent Frederick many of his works in manuscript. Their exchange of more than seven hundred letters remains as an extraordinary literary achievement in its own right.

GENEVA AND FERNEY

In January 1755, after a period of wandering, Voltaire acquired a property in Geneva which he called ‘Les Délices’. A new and more settled phase now began as, at the age of sixty-one, he became master of his own house for the first time: in a letter of March that year, he wrote that ‘I am finally leading the life of a patriarch’. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 may have disturbed his philosophical certainties and caused him to doubt the Leibnizian Optimism which Alexander Pope had helped to popularize, but it did not disturb his new-found personal happiness. His  Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne  appeared within weeks of the earthquake, and it is revealing that his instant literary response should have been in verse. His prose response to the catastrophe, in  Candide , took longer to mature and was published in 1759. In the meantime, he had written articles for the  Encyclopédie  of Diderot and d’Alembert, and in 1756 he published his universal history, the  Essai sur les mœurs .

In 1757, d’Alembert’s critical article ‘Genève’ in the  Encyclopédie  had provoked a scandal in that city. Geneva turned out not to be the model republic that Voltaire had imagined or hoped it was, and after a number of tussles with clerical authority, he resolved to leave the city. A return to Paris would not have been welcomed by the government, so he purchased a house and estate at Ferney, where he installed himself in 1760 – on French soil now, but within striking distance of the border. It was in this symbolically marginal position that Voltaire was to live for the rest of his life. Henceforth he would play the part of the seigneur , caring for his estate and even building a church for the villagers: it bears the deist (and immodest) inscription  Deo erexit Voltaire  (‘Voltaire erected [this] to God’). But this new-found role did not mean that, like Candide, Voltaire had found happiness in cultivating his garden and in ignoring the world beyond. On the contrary, it was in 1760 that Voltaire first issued the rallying cry with which he would henceforth sign many of his letters:  Ecrasons l’Infâme  (‘Let’s crush the infamous’). The stability of his base at Ferney seems to have given Voltaire the opportunity over the following years to launch and encourage the campaigns which soon made him the most famous writer in Europe.

The Calas affair was a defining moment in this crusade for tolerance. The Huguenot Jean Calas was tortured and broken on the wheel in 1762 after being found guilty, on the basis of dubious evidence, of murdering his son. Voltaire successfully led a determined campaign to clear Calas’s name, writing many letters and publishing a number of works, including  Traité sur la tolérance  (1763). Other campaigns followed – a successful one to obtain the rehabilitation of another Huguenot family, the Sirvens, accused of having murdered a daughter recently converted to Catholicism, and an unsuccessful one to achieve a pardon for a nineteen-year-old man, La Barre, condemned to be burned at the stake for having committed certain trivial acts of sacrilege (and for having in his possession a copy of Voltaire’s  Dictionnaire philosophique ). These struggles brought Voltaire to even greater public prominence, and it in no way diminishes his undoubted determination and courage to say that he obviously relished his new role: in a letter of 1766, he wrote to a friend ‘Oh how I love this philosophy of action and goodwill’.

Although many of Voltaire’s later writings concerned his crusade for tolerance and justice, he continued, to write in a wide variety of forms, from tragedy to biblical criticism, and from satire to short fiction ( L’Ingénu , 1767;  Le Taureau blanc , 1773). In February 1778, Voltaire was persuaded by his friends to make a symbolic return to Paris, ostensibly to oversee preparations to stage his latest tragedy,  Irène . It was the first time he had set foot in the capital since 1750, and he was received in triumph. A succession of friends called on him, and despite his deteriorating health, he attended a performance of his new play at the Comédie Française, in the course of which his bust was crowned on stage with a laurel wreath. His health did not permit his return to Ferney, and he died in Paris two months later. Even in death, Voltaire, a celebrated amateur actor, seemed to have stage-managed his departure from the scene so as to gain maximum publicity.

Voltaire and the Enlightenment

In terms of the history of ideas, Voltaire’s single most important achievement was to have helped in the 1730s to introduce the thought of Newton and Locke to France (and so to the rest of the Continent). This achievement is, as Jonathan Israel has recently shown, hardly as radical as has sometimes been thought: the English thinkers in question served essentially as a deistic bulwark against the more radical (atheistic) currents of thought in the Spinozist tradition. Voltaire’s deist beliefs, reiterated throughout his life, came to appear increasingly outmoded and defensive as he grew older and as he became more and more exercised by the spread of atheism. Voltaire’s failure to produce an original philosophy was, in a sense, counterbalanced by his deliberate cultivation of a philosophy of action; his ‘common sense’ crusade against superstition and prejudice and in favour of religious toleration was his single greatest contribution to the progress of Enlightenment. ‘Rousseau writes for writing’s sake’, he declared in a letter of 1767, ‘I write to act.’

It was therefore Voltaire’s literary and rhetorical contributions to the Enlightenment which were truly unique. Interested neither in music (like Rousseau) nor in art (like Diderot), Voltaire was fundamentally a man of language. Through force of style, through skilful choice of literary genre, and through the accomplished manipulation of the book market, he found means of popularizing and promulgating ideas which until then had generally been clandestine. The range of his writing is immense, embracing virtually every genre. In verse, he wrote in every form – epic poetry, ode, satire and epistle, and even occasional and light verse; his drama, also written in verse, includes both comedies and tragedies (although the tragedies have not survived in the modern theatre, many live on in the opera, as, for example, Rossini’s  Semiramide  and  Tancredi ).

It is above all the prose works with which modern readers are familiar, and again the writings cover a wide spectrum: histories, polemical satires, pamphlets of all types, dialogues, short fictions or  contes , and letters both real and fictive. The conspicuous absentee from this list is the novel, a genre which, like the prose  drame , Voltaire thought base and trivial. To understand the strength of his dislike for these ‘new’ genres, we need to remember that Voltaire was a product of the late seventeenth century, the moment of the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, and this literary debate continued to influence his aesthetic views all through his life. Controversial religious and political views were often expressed in the literary forms (classical tragedy, the verse satire) perfected in the seventeenth century; the ‘conservatism’ of these forms seems, to modern readers at least, to compromise the content, though this apparent traditionalism may in fact have helped Voltaire mask the originality of his enterprise: it is at least arguable that in a work such as  Zaïre  (1732), the form of the classical tragedy made its ideas of religious toleration more palatable.

Yet this would also be a simplification, for notwithstanding his apparent literary conservatism, Voltaire was in fact a relentless reformer and experimenter with literary genres, innovative almost despite himself, particularly in the domain of prose. Although he never turned his back on verse drama and philosophical poetry, he experimented with different forms of historical writing and tried his hand at different styles of prose fiction. Above all, he seems to have discovered late in his career the satirical and polemical uses of the fragment, notably in his alphabetic works, the  Dictionnaire philosophique portatif  (1764), containing 73 articles in its first edition, and the  Questions sur l’Encyclopédie  (1770-1772). The latter work, whose first edition contained 423 articles in nine octavo volumes, is a vast and challenging compendium of his thought and ranks among Voltaire’s unrecognized masterpieces. When he died, Voltaire was working on what would have been his third ‘philosophical’ dictionary,  L’Opinion en alphabet .

Voltaire’s ironic, fast-moving, deceptively simple style makes him one of the greatest stylists of the French language. All his life, Voltaire loved to act in his own plays, and this fondness for role-playing carried through into all his writings. He used something like 175 different pseudonyms in the course of his career, and his writing is characterized by a proliferation of different personae and voices. The reader is constantly drawn into dialogue – by a footnote which contradicts the text, or by one voice in the text which argues against another. The use of the mask is so relentless and the presence of humour, irony, and satire so pervasive that the reader has finally no idea of where the ‘real’ Voltaire is. His autobiographical writings are few and entirely unrevealing: as the title of his  Commentaire historique sur les Œuvres de l’auteur de la Henriade  suggests, it is his writings alone which constitute their author’s identity.

In fact we rarely know with certainty what Voltaire truly thought or believed; what mattered to him was the impact of what he wrote. The great crusades of the 1760s taught him to appreciate the importance of public opinion, and in popularizing the clandestine ideas of the early part of the century he played the role of the journalist. He may have been old-fashioned in his nostalgia for the classicism of the previous century, but he was wholly of his day in his consummate understanding of the medium of publishing. He manipulated the book trade to achieve maximum publicity for his ideas, and he well understood the importance of what he called ‘the portable’. In 1766, Voltaire wrote to d’Alembert: ‘Twenty in-folio volumes will never cause a revolution; it’s the little portable books at thirty  sous  which are to be feared.’

Voltaire was also modern in the way he invented himself by fashioning a public image out of his adopted name. As the patriarch of Ferney, he turned himself into an institution whose fame reached across Europe. As an engaged and militant intellectual, he stood at the beginning of a French tradition which looked forward to Emile Zola and to Jean-Paul Sartre, and in modern republican France his name stands as a cultural icon, a symbol of rationalism and the defence of tolerance. Voltaire was a man of paradoxes: the bourgeois who as  de  Voltaire gave himself aristocratic pretensions, but who as plain Voltaire later became a hero of the Revolution; the conservative in aesthetic matters who appeared as a radical in religious and political issues. He was, above all, the master ironist, who, perhaps more than any other writer, gave to the Enlightenment its characteristic and defining tone of voice.

– N. E. Cronk

It has been estimated that, in a career which stretched over sixty years, Voltaire’s extant writings ran to some fifteen million words: everything concerning the  Œuvre  seems larger than life, and it is hard to make any simple assessment of it. ‘Complete’ editions appeared in Voltaire’s lifetime; the last, published by Cramer in Geneva in 1775, ran to forty volumes (the so-called  édition encadrée ). The first complete edition of Voltaire’s writings after his death, known as the Kehl edition, was published on the eve of the Revolution (1785-1789) in seventy octavo volumes (there was also a duodecimo edition in ninety-two volumes). Many complete editions followed in the nineteenth century, culminating in the Moland edition (1877-1883) in fifty-two volumes, which remains – pending the completion of the  Oxford edition  – the standard edition of reference.

Theodore Besterman’s ‘definitive’ edition of Voltaire’s correspondence (1968-1977) includes more than 15,000 letters, but these surviving letters must represent only a fraction of the total number written by Voltaire in his lifetime, probably in excess of 40,000. This edition is part of the larger  Complete Works of Voltaire , a complete and critical edition of all Voltaire’s writings currently being published by the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford; when complete, it will exceed two hundred volumes.

The list  How to quote Voltaire  gives the best available edition for each text that Voltaire wrote. A reliable, searchable version of his works is available on-line on  TOUT VOLTAIRE .

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Voltaire was a French philosopher and historian. His birth name was François-Marie Arouet and he is considered to be one of the best Enlightenment writers because of his versatility as a writer and his ability to create works in nearly all literary forms, such as poems, plays, essays, novels, along with scientific and historical works. He is most famous for writing Candide , which is a satirical novella.

Voltaire’s Early Years

Voltaire was born in Paris to an upper-middle class family in November of 1694. His father was François Arouet and his mother was Marie Marguerite Daumand. The couple had five children with Voltaire being the youngest. His mother died when he was seven years old, and following her passing, Voltaire became close to his very free-thinking godfather.

He was educated at the Collège Louis-le-Grand by the Jesuits from 1704 to 1711. He learned Greek and Latin and later, he became proficient in English, Spanish, and Italian. When he left school, he decided to become a writer, contrary to the plans of his father who expected him to become an attorney.

Voltaire’s Career

Voltaire pretended to be working in Paris as a notary assistant, but he spent most of his time composing poetry. As soon as his father discovered what he was doing, he sent him to Caen, Normandy, to study law. However, he kept on writing, creating many essays, and historical works.

His intelligent wit made him very popular with many aristocratic families that he spent time with. His father found employment for him as the French ambassador’s secretary in the Netherlands. There he met Catherine Olympe Dunoyer, a Protestant refugee from France. They fell in love and planned to elope, but his father forced him to go back to France.

Controversy Surrounds Voltaire

Nearly all of Voltaire’s early life was spent in Paris. Early on, he had problems with officials for not only very mild critiques of the French government, but also for his religious intolerance. Voltaire’s activities resulted in several imprisonments and exiles. His satirical verse regarding the Régent resulted in his imprisonment for eleven months in the Bastille. When he was there, Voltaire wrote Œdipe , his debut play. Its success quickly established his reputation.

Voltaire’s Philosophy

Voltaire’s philosophy was based upon on rationalism and skepticism. Despite his fondness for reason and clarity, he often contradicted himself. Voltaire would state that man’s basic nature could not be changed and then sometimes he believed in progress as well as the progressive humanization of society by art, science, and also commerce.

In religion, Voltaire believed that Christianity was good for tailors and chambermaids to believe in, but he advocated that the elite have a simple deism. He was against atheism and materialism as expressed by Helvétius and Holbach. His statement, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented,” is well known.

Political Thoughts

Voltaire thought the French bourgeoisie was not very effective, the aristocracy was too corrupt and parasitic, the masses too superstitious and ignorant, and that the church was only valuable as a counterbalance against the monarchy. He did not trust democracy, and he believed that it propagated the commoners’ idiocy.

He also believed that philosophers like him were the only ones that could bring about change because it was in the monarchy’s best interest to enhance, not only the power, but also the wealth of France. He essentially believed that the monarchy was the best way for progress and change.

Voltaire’s Major Works

Voltaire’s major works fall under four categories: plays, poetry, philosophical works and historical works. His most famous poetry contains the epic poems Henriade and the incomplete The Maid of Orleans . His body of writing includes the noteworthy historical works of The Age of Louis XIV and his Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations . Voltaire’s well-known philosophic works were the short stories Plato’s Dream and Micromégas .

His most famous work, Candide , is an interesting fictional story about a wandering traveler who is involved in many farcical adventures. The work satirizes Gottfried Leibniz ‘s philosophical work. It starts when Candide is a young man who has lived a very sheltered life and has been influenced by Leibnizian optimism by Pangloss, his mentor.

It goes on to describe the sudden end of this lifestyle, and then his slow, unpleasant disillusionment when he experiences and witnesses several hardships. Voltaire ends Candide with an outright rejection of optimism while promoting more practical principles.

Arrests and Exiles

Voltaire was exiled in 1715 to Tulle for making fun of the regent of Orleans. He returned to Paris in 1717 and was arrested again. This time he was sent to the Bastille for one year on libelous poetry charges. In 1726, he was once again sent to the Bastille. He stayed there for a couple of weeks and then was sent to England.

Voltaire remained there for three years. In 1733, his Letters on the English Nation infuriated the French government and the church which forced him to escape to Lorraine. Voltaire stayed there for 15 years with Emile de Breteuil, his mistress.

Final Years

In February of 1778, he returned to Paris for the first time in 20 years. In May of that year, Voltaire passed away in his sleep. At the time of his death, the French people had begun to regard him as a hero and literary genius.

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