Voltaire

Voltaire — born François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) — was the most famous writer in eighteenth-century Europe and the personification of the Enlightenment. Philosopher, satirist, dramatist, historian, poet, and polemicist, he wielded his pen against intolerance, superstition, and injustice with an effectiveness that no other writer has matched. His Candide (1759) is the most widely read work of the Enlightenment and one of the funniest and most devastating books ever written.

Life and Career

Voltaire was the son of a Parisian notary. Educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, he displayed literary brilliance from his youth and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille — first for satirical verses against the Regent, then after a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman who had him beaten and imprisoned. The eleven months in the Bastille (1717–18) produced his first major work, the epic poem La Henriade.

After his release, he spent three years in England (1726–29), where he encountered Locke, Newton, Shakespeare, and the relative liberty of English intellectual life. Lettres philosophiques (Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733) — effectively praising English institutions as a critique of French ones — was condemned and burned by the French authorities.

He spent fifteen years (1734–49) at Cirey in Lorraine with his intellectual partner and lover, Émilie du Châtelet, one of the most brilliant women of the century — a physicist and mathematician who translated Newton’s Principia into French. After her death in 1749, he accepted Frederick the Great’s invitation to Potsdam, where their celebrated friendship deteriorated into mutual recrimination.

In 1755, Voltaire settled at Les Délices and later at Ferney, near the Swiss border — strategically positioned for escape from French authority. From Ferney he conducted his great campaigns: the rehabilitation of Jean Calas (a Protestant falsely convicted of murdering his son), the defence of the Chevalier de la Barre (executed for blasphemy), and a sustained attack on religious fanaticism summarised by his battle cry “Écrasez l’infâme!” (“Crush the infamous thing!”).

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759) was published anonymously, denied by its author, and immediately recognised as a masterpiece — a philosophical tale that subjects Leibnizian optimism (“This is the best of all possible worlds”) to savage satirical demolition through a catalogue of earthquakes, wars, rapes, slavery, auto-da-fés, and syphilis.

Voltaire returned to Paris in triumph in 1778 at the age of eighty-three, was crowned with laurels at the Comédie-Française, and died on 30 May 1778.

Other Major Works

Voltaire’s range is staggering: he wrote tragedies (over fifty plays performed at the Comédie-Française, though none survives in the modern repertoire), epic poetry (La Henriade), histories (Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1751, a pioneering work of cultural history), a Dictionnaire philosophique (1764, a portable arsenal of Enlightenment ideas disguised as an alphabetical reference work), and contes philosophiques — the philosophical tales, including Zadig (1747), Micromégas (1752), and L’Ingénu (1767), of which Candide is the supreme example.

His central commitments are to reason, tolerance, and the exposure of injustice; his weapon is wit — the sharpest in the French language. His Traité sur la tolérance (1763), written in defence of Jean Calas, is one of the foundational texts of religious tolerance and remains urgently relevant.

Candide remains his enduring masterpiece — a work in which comedy and horror are perfectly fused, and whose final injunction to “cultivate our garden” has become the Enlightenment’s most quoted phrase.

Voltaire as Historian

Before Voltaire, history was largely chronicles of kings and battles. His Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) pioneered what we now call cultural history — attending to commerce, the arts, manners, and the progress of the human mind rather than merely recounting military campaigns and dynastic marriages. His Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) extended this approach to world history, placing European civilization alongside Chinese, Indian, and Islamic societies in a comparative framework that was genuinely revolutionary for its time. He was among the first European intellectuals to argue that China possessed a civilization older and in some respects more sophisticated than Christendom — a deliberate provocation against biblical chronology and European chauvinism.

This historiographical ambition was inseparable from his philosophical project. History, for Voltaire, was the record of human folly and occasional progress — a weapon against the Church’s claim to monopolise truth. His histories sold enormously and shaped how educated Europeans understood their own past for generations.

The Correspondence

Voltaire was one of the great letter-writers in any language. His correspondence — approximately 21,000 surviving letters, addressed to monarchs, philosophers, actresses, scientists, and enemies — constitutes both a literary masterpiece and an incomparable record of eighteenth-century intellectual life. He corresponded with Frederick the Great for over forty years, with Catherine of Russia, with d’Alembert and Diderot, with the Marquise du Deffand, and with hundreds of less famous correspondents who sought his opinion, his patronage, or his devastating wit.

The letters reveal a man far more complex than the public persona suggests — anxious about money, obsessively litigious, capable of great tenderness and great pettiness, and relentlessly industrious. He rose at four or five in the morning and worked until late at night, producing a volume of writing that remains almost unmatched in literary history.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Voltaire was the most famous and influential intellectual of the eighteenth century, and his legacy is the entire tradition of engaged intellectual life — the writer as public conscience, as defender of the oppressed, as enemy of superstition. The French Revolution claimed him (his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in 1791); every subsequent campaign for civil liberties has invoked his name.

Yet his reputation has fluctuated considerably. The Romantics found him cold and mechanical; Flaubert admired his prose but despised his philosophical confidence. In the twentieth century, the postcolonial critique noted that Voltaire’s universalism coexisted with casual racism — his remarks about Africans in the Essai sur les mœurs are indefensible by any standard. His anti-Semitic passages, scattered through his works, have attracted increasing scholarly attention and discomfort. The challenge is to acknowledge these failures without reducing one of the most extraordinary minds in Western history to a catalogue of prejudices.

Key Works

• La Henriade (1723)
• Lettres philosophiques (1733)
• Zadig (1747)
• Candide (1759)
• Traité sur la tolérance (1763)
• Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

Collecting Voltaire

Voltaire’s bibliography is immense — over 2,000 individual publications — and collecting him is a specialised field.

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759) was published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris, Amsterdam, and London in numerous pirated editions. Identifying the true first edition among the twenty or so 1759 editions is a famous bibliographic puzzle; the “true first” (Geneva, Cramer) is identified by specific typographic points documented by Ira Wade and others. Copies of the earliest editions bring $5,000–$30,000.

Lettres philosophiques (1733, Jore, Rouen; simultaneously London as Letters Concerning the English Nation) is the other major collectible. The English edition (1733) preceded the French, making it technically the first.

Voltaire’s autograph letters — he wrote an estimated 20,000 — are available at auction; routine letters bring $1,000–$5,000, while letters of significant content bring $5,000–$20,000. The Kehl edition of his complete works (1784–89, 70 volumes), edited by Beaumarchais, is the great collected edition and brings $3,000–$10,000 complete.