Voltaire

Early Life

François-Marie Arouet was born on November 21, 1694, in Paris, to a prosperous bourgeois family. His father was a notary; his mother died when he was seven. Educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, the young Arouet displayed precocious literary talent and a gift for biting wit that would bring him both fame and trouble throughout his life.

He adopted the pen name 'Voltaire' around 1718 (its origin is debated — possibly an anagram, possibly derived from a family estate). His early satirical verses targeting the regent Philippe d'Orléans earned him eleven months in the Bastille (1717–1718), where he wrote his first major work, the epic poem Oedipe.

England and the Philosophical Letters

A second imprisonment in the Bastille (1726) and subsequent exile to England proved transformative. During nearly three years in England (1726–1729), Voltaire immersed himself in English culture, meeting Newton's circle, attending the Royal Society, and absorbing the thought of Locke, Bacon, and the empiricist tradition. The result was the Lettres philosophiques (Philosophical Letters, 1734) — a brilliantly written comparison of English and French institutions that used praise of English tolerance, parliamentary government, and scientific achievement as implicit criticism of French absolutism, Catholic intolerance, and Cartesian metaphysics. The book was publicly burned in Paris and established Voltaire as the leading voice of the French Enlightenment.

Cirey and Frederick the Great

From 1734 to 1749, Voltaire lived at the Château de Cirey with his intellectual companion and lover, the mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet. Together they studied Newton's physics (Voltaire's Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, 1738, was a key text in popularizing Newtonian science in France) and engaged in wide-ranging philosophical and scientific work. Du Châtelet's death in 1749 devastated Voltaire.

In 1750, he accepted an invitation from Frederick the Great of Prussia to reside at his court in Potsdam. The relationship, initially warm, soured over personal and intellectual quarrels, and Voltaire left after three years.

Ferney: The Patriarch of the Enlightenment

From 1758 until shortly before his death, Voltaire lived at his estate in Ferney, near the Swiss border — strategically positioned to flee French jurisdiction if necessary. From Ferney, he conducted a vast correspondence (over 20,000 surviving letters), wrote prolifically, and intervened in numerous causes célèbres. His campaign to rehabilitate Jean Calas — a Protestant merchant tortured and executed on fabricated charges of murdering his son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism — became the defining case of Enlightenment justice.

His philosophical tale Candide (1759), a savage satire on Leibnizian optimism written in the aftermath of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, is his most enduring literary achievement. Through the absurd misadventures of its naïve hero, Candide demolishes the thesis that 'this is the best of all possible worlds' and concludes with the famous injunction: 'We must cultivate our garden.'

Death and Legacy

Voltaire returned to Paris in February 1778 for the first time in nearly three decades, receiving a triumphal welcome. The excitement and exertion overwhelmed him; he died on May 30, 1778, at the age of 83. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon in 1791 during the French Revolution.

Voltaire's influence on the Enlightenment and on modern Western values of tolerance, free expression, and the separation of church and state is immeasurable. His literary output — over 2,000 books and pamphlets, 20,000 letters, plays, poems, histories, and philosophical tales — is one of the largest in literary history.