Voltaire

Life and legacy

Francois-Marie Arouet was born on 21 November 1694 in Paris, the youngest surviving child of a notary at the Chatelet and his wife, who came from a family of minor nobility. Educated by the Jesuits at the College Louis-le-Grand, the young Arouet proved a brilliant student of rhetoric and literature. After rebuffing his father's plans for a legal career, he established himself as a wit and poet in Parisian literary salons. In 1718, following the success of his tragedy Oedipe, he adopted the pen name Voltaire - possibly an anagram of "Arouet l.j." (le jeune) - which he would make the most famous name in European letters.

Voltaire's career was marked by a creative restlessness matched by frequent brushes with authority. Twice imprisoned in the Bastille - first for satirical verses against the Regent, then after a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan - he was exiled to England from 1726 to 1729. This period proved transformative: he encountered the ideas of Newton, Locke, and the relative freedoms of English political life, and returned to France fired with enthusiasm for empirical science and constitutional liberty. His Lettres philosophiques (Philosophical Letters, 1734), comparing English and French institutions to the latter's disadvantage, caused a sensation and was publicly burned by the authorities.

Voltaire's literary output was vast: he wrote plays, poetry, histories, philosophical tales, essays, and thousands of letters. His masterpiece is Candide (1759), a satirical novella that skewers the philosophical optimism of Leibniz through the misadventures of its naive hero across a world of earthquake, war, slavery, and corruption. Written with devastating wit and compression, it remains one of the most widely read and translated works of literature in any language.

From 1759 until his death, Voltaire lived at his estate at Ferney near the Swiss border, from where he conducted a one-man campaign against religious intolerance, judicial corruption, and superstition. He championed the cause of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant wrongly executed for the alleged murder of his son, and his intervention helped secure a posthumous reversal of the verdict. His slogan "Ecrasez l'infame!" ("Crush the infamous thing!") - directed at organized religious oppression - became a rallying cry for the Enlightenment.

In February 1778, the eighty-three-year-old Voltaire returned to Paris for the first time in nearly three decades and was received in triumph. He attended the premiere of his final play, Irene, at the Comedie-Francaise and was crowned with a laurel wreath by the adoring audience. He died on 30 May 1778. His influence on the French Revolution, on the separation of church and state, and on the culture of free expression is immeasurable.

Key accomplishments

• Wrote Candide (1759), one of the most celebrated satirical works in world literature
• Published Lettres philosophiques (1734), introducing English empiricism and political liberty to France
• Championed the cause of Jean Calas and fought against religious intolerance and judicial abuse
• Produced a vast body of work including plays, histories, philosophical tales, and over 20,000 surviving letters
• Became the leading intellectual voice of the Enlightenment, advocating reason, tolerance, and civil liberties

Quotes

Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. (If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)

Epitre a l'auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs, 1768

Ecrasez l'infame! (Crush the infamous thing!)

Repeated in correspondence from the 1760s onward, directed at religious intolerance

Related figures