VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET. — Man of letters, born in Paris on 21 November 1694 and died there on 30 May 1778. At the age of twenty-four he assumed the name of Monsieur de V.
At the age of ten he entered the Collège Louis-le-Grand, directed by the Jesuits, where he received an excellent classical education and established relationships important for his future, distinguishing himself through precocious intelligence and pronounced impertinence. His father would have liked to make him a king’s lawyer; but he preferred literature and a brilliant, carefree existence. His mordant wit and poetic gifts made him welcome in high society, whose doors the Abbé de Châteauneuf had opened to him. At twenty-three he entered the Bastille for the first time, on account of an ode falsely attributed to him against the Regent; released shortly afterward, he was introduced at Court. In 1718, with Oedipe, begun three years earlier, he achieved his first dramatic success. Meanwhile the Henriade was taking shape; but, in addition to Henry IV, the poem exalted certain Huguenot figures and bore a dedication to Louis XV that seemed disrespectful; it was printed clandestinely in 1723. The previous year, an epistle in verse, which some identified with the Epitre à Uranie (printed and circulated in 1738), gave V. a reputation as a denier of every revealed religion.
In April 1726 an anonymous informant denounced him to the police for having “openly preached deism” and attacked Christianity. V. was at that moment once again in the Bastille: beaten by the servants of the Chevalier de Rohan, with whom he had exchanged insults at the theatre, he had challenged him to a duel; but the nobleman, scorning to fight a commoner, had arranged to have him imprisoned. He was released after a month, promising to go to England for some time. The three years he spent there were decisive for his intellectual formation: he had the opportunity to become closely acquainted with the country of Locke, Newton, deism, and free thought. Having quickly learned the language, he was able to assimilate its culture, knowledge of which he would mediate to the rest of Europe. Thanks to good recommendations, he was favorably received by both Tories and Whigs and protected by the Court; he was a guest of Pope and Swift, who strongly influenced his satirical style. His financial position, despite temporary difficulties, already gave him complete independence: at his father’s death in 1722 he had inherited a substantial estate, which he later increased, enabling him to lead a life suited to the circles he frequented.
Returning to France in 1729, V. gathered his English experiences in the Lettres sur les anglais (or Lettres philosophiques), published in English in 1733 and the following year in French. A decree of the Parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burned and its author sought; this helped increase the work’s fame and circulation, and within a year it had reached its fifth edition. Subsequently, the addition of a twenty-fifth letter, containing fifty-seven unfavorable observations on Pascal’s Pensées (completed in 1742), provided a further cause for scandal. Prudently withdrawing from Paris, V. settled at Cirey-sur-Blaise, in the castle of the cultured and lively Marquise du Châtelet, with whom he conducted not very successful experiments in physics and pursued studies in metaphysics. During this period V.’s fame was above all that of a dramatic poet: Artémire and Marianne had failed, but Brutus (1731), La mort de César (1735), and especially Zaïre (1732) and Alzire (1736) were successful. The Parisian scandal surrounding Mahomet ou le Fanatisme dates from 1742; it was followed by Mérope (1743), Sémiramis (1748), L'orphelin de la Chine (1755), Tancrède (1760), and Olympie (1763).
V., meanwhile, had been traveling. In 1740 he was at Cièves, with Frederick II, and in 1743 at Berlin, to persuade the King of Prussia to renew his alliance with France; from 1744 to 1750 he was at Versailles. But after 1746, the year in which he was received into the Académie de France, his favor began to decline: having sold his court office for 60,000 livres, V. II. The friendship between the two did not last long; after three years in Berlin, V. departed furiously, not without hurling against Maupertuis, president of the Prussian Academy and his enemy at court, the shafts of the Diatribe du docteur Ahakia. He understood that the most advantageous position for him was the independent one that fame and wealth secured: he first purchased an estate on Lake Geneva, which he named “Les délices,” and then settled in the territory of Fernex (v. would write Ferney), at the foot of the Jura, on the border between France and Switzerland. Here V. property, received visitors from throughout Europe, had his dramas performed, and continued tirelessly in his literary activity, protected by a very thin veil of anonymity or pseudonyms, which concealed the author from the eyes of the censors but not from those of the readers. In February 1778 he left for Paris, invited to the performance of Irène; he was received there in triumph, but died after a few months of intense and exhausting activity. His body, first buried secretly in the Abbey of Scellière, in Champagne, was interred in the Panthéon in Paris in July 1791.
1.
V. and religion
V.’s entire work has its root in a fundamental positive and sincere trait of his personality: opposition to fanaticism, which, however, expresses itself through the gravest errors. V. fanaticism, as in the episode of Jean Calas, a Calvinist merchant from Toulouse accused of having killed his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. V. obtained his rehabilitation by the judiciary after the sentence had been carried out. Episodes of this kind, frequent during V.’s final years, caused less attractive aspects of his moral character to recede into the background. But above all, V. wished to combat fanaticism with his pen, which wit and stylistic perfection made a formidable weapon. The error lay in having identified too simplistically the source of fanaticism with positive religion; and the struggle that should have been directed against the former was waged against the latter, and especially against Christianity. V. was not without a certain core of religious feeling. There is a God, and “we are his work,” says Le philosophe ignorant (ch. 19), which may be regarded as V.’s spiritual testament. For him, true philosophers are “apostles of divinity”: “A catechist tells children that there is a God; Newton demonstrates it to the wise” (Dictionnaire, s. V. Athée). V. likewise admits a Providence and final causes, while excluding Grace; he speaks of rewards and punishments according to merit (ibid., s. V. Théisme), though it is not clear on what foundation, given his doubts concerning the immortality of the soul. But he goes no further: dogmas appear to him a fabric of absurdities. Rejecting the concept of Revelation and, on the other hand, lacking the philosophical capacity to grasp a profound meaning in dogma, V. regards every statement concerning the Trinity, the twofold nature of Christ, transubstantiation, and so forth as absolutely meaningless; but history shows that wars have been fought and human blood shed in the name of these dogmas; therefore V. considers it his duty to combat them. Unable to distinguish religion from fanaticism, he cannot understand that what drives people to violence is something different from religion, even though, humanly speaking, it may happen that it becomes mixed with it, whether in good faith or bad. Moreover, typical of him is the prejudice that religion makes political power intolerant, even when it is clear that political power merely cloaks itself, for its own purposes, in religious garb.This explains why, while he regards positive religion as a mere fable, he speaks of it preferentially in all his works. Decisive for him on this point, too, was his stay in England, where, amid the flourishing of the sects, discussions on religious questions were not confined to a relatively small number of individuals, but occupied all educated people, even if their religiosity was superficial. The doctrine and arguments displayed by V. derive largely from the English deists, particularly Bolingbroke, to whom the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke, of 1767, is dedicated; and, for biblical criticism, from Bayle, Spinoza, Levesque de Burgin, Fréret, etc. V. added nothing of his own beyond the agility and satirical tone of the exposition. In addition to the Examen cited, the following should be remembered: Le Tombeau du Fanatisme (1767), La défense de mon oncle (1769), La Bible enfin expliquée (1776), Un chrétien contre six Juifs (1777), the articles in the Dictionnaire, etc. Many of these writings follow the same pattern: they begin with the biblical narrative, which V. never tires of ridiculing, quoting passages and episodes detached from their context so as to bring out only their human aspect, presented now in a grotesque, now in a cruel light. Contradictions, difficulties of dating, etc., which V., following his authors, pointed out, were then capable of making an impression. Irreverence diminishes in the face of the figure of Jesus; but for him Jesus is no more than a Jew of upright intentions and a more open mind than the common run, who gathers the humble around him and does not conceal his antipathy toward the priests of his time, who slander him and have him executed. Jesus is a kind of “rustic Socrates” (Oeuvres, ed. Moland [cf. bibl.], XXVI, p. 353, and XXVII, p. 69). For V., the spread of Christianity has no connection whatsoever with the preaching of Jesus: dogmas, sacraments, and miracles are all inventions of the leaders of the sects that swarmed throughout the Roman Empire, one of which, after enabling Constantine, with its money, to usurp the throne, succeeded in prevailing through political power. V. explains the rise of the Church by the credulity of the many and the bad faith of the few who, for purposes of wealth and power, cultivated that credulity with fables. With these explanations, V. was convinced that he was treating religious history rationally, on the same level as profane history.
2. V. history. — Historical research is not, for V., an end in itself: it must enlighten minds concerning the errors and values of the past, so as to make possible a better organization of present life. V.’s first historical work, still somewhat novelistic, is the Histoire de Charles XII (1731), in which the adventures of the rash king of Sweden serve to show the vanity of a glory pursued through war and conquest. The Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) examines the most splendid period of French history, in which the flourishing of the sciences, letters, and arts corresponds to a policy of conquest that sows the seeds of future difficulties. V. has the merit, unusual at the time, of assigning a large place to the activities of the spirit within the general framework of civilization, relegating political history to a secondary position (cf. Oeuvres, ed. cit., XXXIII, p. 506). This is apparent in the title of the Essai sur les moeurs, begun in 1740 as a continuation of Bossuet’s Discours sur l'histoire universelle, from Charlemagne to Louis XIV. The definitive text of 1769 is preceded by a summary survey of earlier epochs, under the title Philosophie de l'histoire (1765). Other historical works by V. are the Histoire de Russie (1759), the Précis du siècle de Louis XV (completed in 1768), and the Histoire du Parlement de Paris (1769).
Although lacking a true historical sense, V. is a popularizer, endowed—when his passion does not obscure his judgment—with some critical sense. His conception of history, although still pragmatic (in that accidental causes are placed on the same level as profound reasons), is superior to that of the majority of his contemporaries.
3. V. the philosopher and writer. — In philosophy V. does not prove original; he takes from Bayle, Clarke, Shaftesbury, Newton, and, above all, Locke the theories that seem most reasonable to him: one need only look at the Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (1727), the Traité de métaphysique (1734), Le philosophe ignorant (1766), and the Lettres de Memmias à Cicléron (1771). But of the greatest importance for the history of philosophy is the “rationalist” polemic conducted by V. in the religious, historical, political, and other fields. The weapon of this polemic is the Dictionnaire philosophique, a more agile instrument of struggle than the massive volumes of the Encyclopédie and, at the same time, more explicit and less concerned with censorship. To the Dictionnaire portatif, completed in 1764, the Kehl publishers (v. BIBLICA) added the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, the articles for Diderot’s encyclopedia, the Opinion par alphabet, and other works (seven volumes in all).
Philosophical in the sense of the time are also the Contes or romans à thèse, to which V.’s literary fame is largely attached today. Many of them follow a consistent pattern: the protagonist’s journeys serve V., following the example of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, to paint contemporary European life satirically, to which there is generally opposed the example of a wise state, sometimes imaginary, sometimes identified with China, as was then customary. Along these lines are Zadig, ou la destinée (1748), in which the idea is developed that one can never know whether an event will come to harm or benefit, Candide ou l'optimisme (1759), which mocks the Leibnizian notion of the “best of all possible worlds,” and La princesse de Babylone (1768): Zadig’s wisdom and Candide’s candor, on coming into contact with human malignity, become sources of trouble; but the conclusion is cheerful even, ultimately, in Candide (“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”). The art of storytelling is great, even though certain motifs are overemphasized (every ship in Candide is attacked by pirates, etc.); particularly effective is the satire of military glory. Also worth mentioning are Micromégas (1752), l'Ingénu (1767), and l'homme aux quarante écus (1767), the last concerning economic matters.
Much less lively today than these tales, the pamphlets, and the “facéties” are the tragedies, although V. was not lacking in theatrical talent. Here too, the motif that recurs most often is the disastrous consequence of fanaticism. The few comedies (Les originaux, 1732; Nanine, 1749, etc.), which were pathetic in tone, always met with little success.
As for the Pucelle d'Orléans (1775), the mock-heroic poem about Joan of Arc that so amused the libertines and scandalized the respectable, today it is simply boring.
4. The politics and influence of V. — V.’s entire production also has a practical purpose. He advocates progressive social reforms without violent upheaval, coordinated with particular needs: in France, he would like an enlightened monarchy whose limitations on power would leave it “free to do good, powerless to do evil,” as in England (cf. Lettres sur les anglais, ed. cit., VIII, 67); he would like respect for the pairing of “liberty and property”; the Church should be subordinated to the State, and ecclesiastics limited in number and subject to taxation. V. sees economic development as lying more in agriculture and the rapid circulation of money than in industry; particularly important is the reorganization of justice.
Several of the reforms advocated by V. were implemented by the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, although the Revolution, as such, was inspired far more by the spirit of Rousseau than by that of V. or the Encyclopedists. V.’s work influenced the events that followed his death, above all by undermining the will of the ruling classes to resist; skeptical of everything and, in particular, of their own political function, they allowed themselves to be carried away by events. With emigration, the aristocracy ceased to be Voltairean, and under the Restoration Voltaireanism became the preserve of the liberal and anticlerical circles of the bourgeoisie. A direct Voltairean influence was renewed at the end of the century: typically, for example, in Anatole France, and not merely as a man of letters; and if one examines the mentality of anticlerical circles, it is not difficult to discover in them a substratum, often unconscious, of Voltaireanism.