Voltaire
Updated: Sep 7
Early Life and Education
Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet in Paris on November 21, 1694, was one of the most consequential writers of the European Enlightenment. He did not construct a comprehensive philosophical system. Instead, he wrote across drama, poetry, history, philosophical fiction, essays, pamphlets, scientific writing, dictionary articles, and correspondence. His characteristic method was to make abstract questions concrete through irony, satire, historical example, and narrative. Religious persecution, censorship, judicial injustice, fanaticism, arbitrary authority, and the uses and limits of reason recur throughout his work.
Educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, he studied Latin, classical literature, rhetoric, and poetry. His father intended him for a legal career, but Voltaire increasingly devoted himself to literature. In 1717, satirical writing concerning the Regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, contributed to his imprisonment in the Bastille.
After his release, his tragedy Œdipe was performed in 1718 and became his first major theatrical success. The same year, François-Marie Arouet adopted the name Voltaire. The name is generally explained as an anagram of “Arouet l(e) j(e)une,” taking account of eighteenth-century typographical conventions. The Voltaire Foundation discusses the development of the name and the circumstances surrounding his early literary career. (Voltaire Foundation)
The Rohan Affair and England
In 1726, Voltaire became involved in a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. After being attacked by Rohan's servants, Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille. He was released on the condition that he leave France and went to England.
He lived there from 1726 to 1728, learned English, and encountered a different literary, political, scientific, and religious culture. Locke and Newton were particularly important to his intellectual development.
England gave Voltaire a comparative perspective on French society. His Lettres philosophiques grew out of the experience. The work first appeared in English in London in 1733 as Letters Concerning the English Nation and in French in 1734. It examines English religion, politics, government, literature, science, and commerce. The French publication was condemned and burned.
The English experience was important not because Voltaire arrived there as a finished philosopher and returned as another, but because it accelerated his development as a writer of prose and gave him a sustained comparative framework for thinking about France. (Voltaire Foundation)
Émilie du Châtelet and Cirey
In 1734, after the suppression of the Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire withdrew to Cirey with Émilie du Châtelet.
Du Châtelet was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and scholar in her own right. Their relationship was both personal and intellectual. At Cirey they studied mathematics, physics, philosophy, history, and literature and participated in the wider European debate over Newtonian science.
Du Châtelet's French translation and commentary on Newton's Principia Mathematica was published in 1759, ten years after her death. It was a substantial scholarly undertaking, not simply a translation exercise.
Voltaire also wrote Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, published in 1738. The book presented Newtonian ideas to a broader French readership.
Their intellectual partnership continued until Du Châtelet's death in 1749.
History and Civilization
Voltaire's historical writing was as important to his career as his fiction.
In Le Siècle de Louis XIV, first published in 1751, he examined the reign of Louis XIV together with literature, science, the arts, commerce, and intellectual life.
The larger Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations pursued an even wider history of civilizations and customs. Voltaire examined religion, commerce, institutions, cultural practices, and intellectual development rather than restricting history to dynasties and military events.
His method was highly interpretative. He selected and judged evidence according to his own philosophical commitments, and his historical writing does not correspond to modern professional historiography. Nevertheless, he helped broaden the subjects that could be treated as part of the history of civilization. (Voltaire Foundation)
The Philosophical Tale
Voltaire developed the philosophical tale into one of the most effective forms of eighteenth-century literary argument.
In works such as Zadig, Micromégas, Candide, and L'Ingénu, philosophical propositions are tested through experience. Characters encounter accident, violence, injustice, ignorance, and suffering that expose the limits of the ideas with which they began.
The form suited Voltaire's temperament. A philosophical question could become a narrative problem, allowing irony to emerge from the difference between what a character believes and what actually happens.
Candide
Candide, ou l'optimisme was published anonymously in 1759, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and during the Seven Years' War.
The novel attacks the proposition associated with Pangloss that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” Candide encounters war, violence, greed, religious persecution, exploitation, colonial slavery, and natural catastrophe. Voltaire repeatedly places abstract explanations beside concrete suffering.
The final sentence is:
« Il faut cultiver notre jardin. »
“We must cultivate our garden.”
The sentence is not a complete theory of society or a solution to the problem of evil. It marks a turn away from speculative explanations toward work, responsibility, and the portion of human life that can actually be acted upon.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France's Candide resource provides publication history and contextual material on the work.
The Enlightenment Network
Voltaire belonged to a European intellectual network that extended across national and social boundaries. He interacted with writers, philosophers, scientists, publishers, lawyers, aristocrats, and rulers.
His relations with Diderot and d'Alembert placed him within the wider intellectual culture surrounding the Encyclopédie. He contributed to the project, but he was neither its principal editor nor its director.
His relationship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau became increasingly antagonistic. Their disagreements over religion, civilization, society, education, and human nature are a reminder that the Enlightenment was not a single unified philosophy.
Frederick the Great
Voltaire's relationship with Frederick II of Prussia reveals an important tension in his political thought.
Frederick began corresponding with Voltaire in 1736. Voltaire eventually accepted his invitation to Prussia and lived at the royal court from 1750 to 1753.
Voltaire admired Frederick's intelligence and literary interests and was attracted to the possibility that an educated ruler might introduce rational reforms. The relationship eventually collapsed amid personal disputes, financial disagreements, and conflicts at court.
The experience exposed the difficulty of remaining intellectually independent while living in proximity to political power.
Voltaire was not a democrat in the modern sense. He was generally suspicious of popular rule and placed substantial confidence in educated elites and enlightened rulers as agents of reform. This aspect of his political thought is essential to understanding why his relationship with Frederick initially seemed plausible to him. (Voltaire Foundation)
Deism and Religious Criticism
Voltaire was a deist rather than an atheist. He believed in a rational creator while rejecting revealed dogma, superstition, and coercive religious authority.
His criticism of religion focused particularly on fanaticism, persecution, clerical privilege, and claims to theological certainty that he regarded as incompatible with reason.
His repeated expression,
« Écrasez l'infâme ! »
“Crush the infamous thing!”
summarized his campaign against fanaticism and persecution. The “infâme” was not simply a synonym for religion. Voltaire used the term in a wider polemical campaign against the forms of religious authority and intolerance that he regarded as destructive.
Jean Calas and Toleration
Voltaire's intervention in the case of Jean Calas became one of the defining episodes of his later career.
Calas, a Protestant merchant in Toulouse, was condemned and executed on March 10, 1762, after being accused of murdering his son. Voltaire became convinced that religious prejudice had contributed to the judgment.
He gathered information, obtained legal documents, corresponded with people involved in the affair, consulted supporters, and worked to bring the case before a wider public. His campaign lasted for several years.
On March 9, 1765, the Council of State annulled the original judgment and rehabilitated the Calas family.
The affair directly inspired Traité sur la tolérance, first published in 1763. Voltaire used the case to examine religious fanaticism, judicial error, and the moral and political necessity of toleration. (Voltaire Foundation)
Sirven and La Barre
The Calas affair was part of a wider campaign. Voltaire supported the Sirven family, Protestants who had been persecuted in southern France. He also intervened in the case of the Chevalier de La Barre, who was executed in 1766 after accusations of blasphemy and other offenses.
Voltaire's efforts did not save La Barre. He nevertheless continued to publicize the case and used it as an example of what he regarded as disproportionate punishment and religiously influenced justice.
These cases demonstrate the practical side of his later work: philosophical arguments about toleration were increasingly connected to particular people, documents, trials, and legal procedures.
Correspondence
Correspondence was central to Voltaire's intellectual life.
The reference edition of his correspondence contains 21,221 letters, including letters from and to Voltaire and correspondence between third parties. More than 15,000 of the letters were written by Voltaire. New letters continue to be identified.
Because Voltaire did not systematically retain copies of everything he sent, the surviving corpus does not represent the whole of his correspondence.
His letters connected him with philosophers, writers, scientists, publishers, lawyers, rulers, aristocrats, and other correspondents throughout Europe. They were used for intellectual exchange, literary business, information gathering, legal campaigns, political discussion, and personal communication. (Voltaire Foundation)
Ferney
In 1759, Voltaire acquired the seigneury of Ferney near the French–Swiss frontier.
He constructed the central part of the château between 1759 and 1761 and added two wings in 1765. The building reached its definitive appearance in 1766.
Ferney was not simply a private retreat. Voltaire encouraged manufacturing and participated in improvements to the settlement. Watchmaking, earthenware, tanning, pottery, and silkworm breeding developed there, while improvements included paved streets, a fountain, a school, and housing for craftsmen.
He continued to write, correspond, receive visitors, and intervene in legal controversies from Ferney. The estate became the setting for the final major phase of his life. (Château de Voltaire)
The Limits of Voltaire's Universalism
Voltaire's advocacy of toleration did not amount to a fully consistent doctrine of equality.
His writings contain racial theories of human difference and judgments about peoples and cultures that are incompatible with contemporary understandings of equality. His relationship with slavery is also contradictory. Candide exposes the brutality of colonial slavery, particularly in its Surinam episode, while Voltaire was involved financially in colonial commerce.
These contradictions belong to the historical context of his Enlightenment rather than being problems that can be resolved by portraying him either as a flawless champion of liberty or as a writer whose achievements are negated by his prejudices.
His thought combined criticism of certain forms of oppression with assumptions about social hierarchy, race, empire, and civilization that remained characteristic of his period.
Return to Paris
Voltaire returned to Paris on February 10, 1778, after twenty-eight years away.
He was received by large crowds and celebrated as a major literary figure. On March 30, during the sixth performance of Irène at the Théâtre-Français, he was publicly acclaimed and crowned with laurels. He was also received by the Académie française.
The reception marked a striking change from the circumstances of his earlier career, when imprisonment and exile had been consequences of his conflicts with powerful figures and institutions.
Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778, at the age of eighty-three. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
The Panthéon
After his death, Voltaire was buried at the Abbey of Sellières in Champagne.
Thirteen years later, during the French Revolution, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon on July 11, 1791. The ceremony was highly symbolic. Revolutionary France incorporated Voltaire into its own intellectual genealogy and transformed the memory of the former prisoner of the Bastille into part of the cultural history of the new order.
The BnF records the transfer and the remarkable role played by Voltaire's works and images in the ceremony. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
Legacy
Voltaire's importance lies in the unusual combination of literary invention and intellectual intervention.
He brought philosophical questions into fiction, enlarged the scope of historical writing, used correspondence as a sustained means of intellectual exchange, and intervened directly in cases of judicial and religious controversy.
He did not invent liberty, religious toleration, or freedom of inquiry, and his own thought remained marked by the assumptions and contradictions of the eighteenth century. But he gave criticism an unusually powerful literary form.
The scale of his achievement is reflected in the modern scholarly edition of his works: the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, completed in 2022, comprises 205 volumes. (Voltaire Foundation)
Voltaire's lasting significance lies not in a finished philosophical doctrine but in the range of forms through which he examined belief, power, justice, knowledge, religion, society, and human conduct.
Further Reading
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu
Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford: www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk
Château de Voltaire at Ferney: www.chateau-ferney-voltaire.fr