Birth and a new name
Born in Paris and educated by the Jesuits, he was held in the Bastille and took the name Voltaire after the success of Œdipe.
Enlightenment · deism · philosophy of toleration · 1694–1778
Voltaire
Fight fanaticism with reason and irony.
Paris · Cirey · Ferney
Biography
The thread of a life.
Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, was a poet, playwright, historian and polemicist who made philosophy a public weapon against fanaticism and arbitrary justice. Drawing on Locke and Newton, he defended a deism of reason, religious toleration and legal reform, and turned the tale, the letter and the pamphlet into instruments of critical inquiry.
England and the Letters
Exile in England led to the Philosophical Letters, which the Parlement of Paris condemned in 1734.
The Cirey years
At Cirey he lived and worked with Émilie du Châtelet, studying Newton and writing history, tales and plays.
At the Prussian court
At the court of Frederick II he published The Age of Louis XIV before breaking with the king.
Geneva, Lisbon and Candide
Settled near Geneva, he answered the Lisbon earthquake with a poem on evil, then moved to Ferney and published Candide.
Campaigns from Ferney
The Calas affair, the Treatise on Tolerance and the Philosophical Dictionary preceded his return to Paris, where he died in 1778.
Understanding a life in depth
01From Arouet to Voltaire
Born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary, François-Marie Arouet was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he acquired a classical culture, a taste for the theatre and lasting friendships among the elite. Satirical verses attributed to him earned him almost a year in the Bastille from 1717; he emerged with a tragedy, Œdipe, whose triumph in 1718 coincided with his new name, Voltaire. Epic poetry and the stage made him famous, but a quarrel with the chevalier de Rohan in 1726 showed him how fragile a commoner’s wit remained in the face of aristocratic privilege.
02England, Cirey and Newton
Exiled to England from 1726 to 1728, Voltaire discovered a monarchy limited by Parliament, the coexistence of many churches, the social prestige of commerce and the work of Locke and Newton. The Philosophical Letters drew on that experience; their condemnation in 1734 led him to settle at Cirey, in Champagne, with Émilie du Châtelet. For some fifteen years study, experiments, history and theatre went together there: the Elements of Newton’s Philosophy of 1738 owed much to this partnership, whose intellectual weight should not be reduced to its romantic side.
03Prussia, Lisbon and Ferney
After Émilie du Châtelet’s death in 1749, Voltaire accepted Frederick II’s invitation to Prussia, where he published The Age of Louis XIV in 1751. A quarrel with Maupertuis and a humiliating detention in Frankfurt in 1753 ended the experiment. He then settled near Geneva and, from 1759, at Ferney, just inside France, a position that let him slip between several jurisdictions. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired a poem on the problem of evil, to which Rousseau answered with a letter on providence; Candide, in 1759, took up the question in the form of a tale.
04The patriarch of Ferney
At Ferney Voltaire ran an estate, workshops and an immense correspondence, while publishing, often anonymously or under pseudonyms, tales, the Philosophical Dictionary of 1764 and pamphlets against what he called “the infamous thing”. From 1762 the Calas affair made him the defender of victims of judicial and religious fanaticism, followed by the Sirven and La Barre cases. Returning to Paris in 1778, he was celebrated at the theatre and died there that same year; his remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1791. His writings also contain hostile passages on Jews and polygenist claims about human races that scholars now examine critically.
His campaigns made the man of letters a public defender of the persecuted and helped shape modern ideas of toleration, free expression and penal reform. His irony remains a model of critique, but his deism, his compromises with powerful patrons and his anti-Jewish passages invite reading him critically rather than as a saint of the Enlightenment.
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