Francois Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a literary genius whose brilliant writings often caused extreme controversy during his time. He is known for his works that include poetry, plays, and writings on philosophy and history. Voltaire gained fame through his work on Candide and several other plays that were based on tragedy.
Career
Voltaire began his career as a notary assistant in Paris but he actually spent most of his time writing satirical poetry against the wishes of his father. He was employed as a secretary to the French Embassy for a short while but his interest in literature made him include himself in religious places and the free-thinking society.
After the death of Louis XIV, under the morally relaxed Regency, Voltaire became the wit of Parisian society, and his epigrams were widely quoted. In 1717, after being accused of the involvement in the conspiracy of Giulio Alberoni against Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, then Regent for King Louis XV of France, and his writings about the Regent led him being imprisoned in the infamous Bastille for eleven months. While there, however, he wrote his debut play, Oedipe. In 1718, following this incarceration, he adopted the name, Voltaire, both as a pen-name and for daily use, which many have seen as marking his formal separation from his family and his past.
The success of the play Oedipe made him renowned as Voltaire and was also declared to be the next Jean Racine at the time. He worked at an epic poem whose hero was Henry IV, the king beloved by the French people for having put an end to the wars of religion. This Henriade is spoiled by its pedantic imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid, but his contemporaries saw only the generous ideal of tolerance that inspired the poem. These literary triumphs earned him a pension from the regent and the warm approval of the young queen, Marie. He thus began his career as a court poet.
Voltaire became interested in England, he visited the Tory leader Viscount Bolingbroke. His intellectual development was furthered by an accident, as the result of a quarrel with a member of one of the leading French families, the chevalier de Rohan, who had made fun of his adopted name, he was beaten up, taken to the Bastille, and then conducted to Calais on May 5, 1726, whence he set out for London. During a stay that lasted more than two years he succeeded in learning the English language, he wrote his notebooks in English and to the end of his life he was able to speak and write it fluently. He was presented at court, and he dedicated his Henriade to Queen Caroline.
Voltaire returned to France at the end of 1728 or the beginning of 1729 and decided to present England as a model to his compatriots. His social position was consolidated. By judicious speculation he began to build up the vast fortune that guaranteed his independence. He attempted to revive tragedy by discreetly imitating Shakespeare. Brutus, begun in London and accompanied by a Discours à milord Bolingbroke, was scarcely a success in 1730, La Mort de César was played only in a college in 1735, in Eriphyle in 1732, the apparition of a ghost, as in Hamlet, was booed by the audience. Zaïre, however, was a resounding success. The play, in which the sultan Orosmane, deceived by an ambiguous letter, stabs his prisoner, the devoted Christian-born Zaïre, in a fit of jealousy, captivated the public with its exotic subject.
At the same time, Voltaire had turned to a new literary genre, history. In London he had made the acquaintance of Fabrice, a former companion of the Swedish king Charles XII. The interest he felt for the extraordinary character of this great soldier impelled him to write his life, Histoire de Charles XII in 1731, a carefully documented historical narrative that reads like a novel.
Philosophic ideas began to impose themselves as he wrote: the King of Sweden’s exploits brought desolation, whereas his rival Peter the Great brought Russia into being, bequeathing a vast, civilized empire. Great men are not warmongers; they further civilization—a conclusion that tallied with the example of England. It was this line of thought that Voltaire brought to fruition, after prolonged meditation, in a work of incisive brevity: the Lettres philosophiques (1734). These fictitious letters are primarily a demonstration of the benign effects of religious toleration.
Scandal followed publication of this work that spoke out so frankly against the religious and political establishment. When a warrant of arrest was issued in May of 1734, Voltaire took refuge in the château of Mme du Châtelet at Cirey in Champagne. This period of retreat was interrupted only by a journey to the Low Countries in December 1736—an exile of a few weeks became advisable after the circulation of a short, daringly epicurean poem called "Le Mondain."
After Adélaïde du Guesclin that came out in 1734, a play about a national tragedy, he brought Alzire to the stage in 1736 with great success. Mme du Châtelet was passionately drawn to the sciences and metaphysics and influenced Voltaire’s work in that direction. While she was learning English in order to translate Newton and The Fable of the Bees of Bernard de Mandeville, Voltaire popularized, in his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (1738), those discoveries of English science that were familiar only to a few advanced minds in France, such as the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis.
At the same time, he continued to pursue his historical studies. He began Le Siècle de Louis XIV, sketched out a universal history of kings, wars, civilization, and manners that became the Essai sur les moeurs, and plunged into biblical exegesis.
Because of a lawsuit, he followed Mme du Châtelet to Brussels in May 1739, and thereafter they were constantly on the move between Belgium, Cirey, and Paris. Voltaire corresponded with the crown prince of Prussia, who, rebelling against his father’s rigid system of military training and education, had taken refuge in French culture. When the prince acceded to the throne as Frederick II (the Great), Voltaire visited his disciple first at Cleves (Kleve, Germany), then at Berlin.
When the War of the Austrian Succession broke out, Voltaire was sent to Berlin in 1742–43 on a secret mission to rally the king of Prussia, who was proving himself a faithless ally, to the assistance of the French army. Such services - as well as his introduction of his friends the brothers d’Argenson, who became ministers of war and foreign affairs, respectively, to the protection of Mme de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV - brought him into favour again at Versailles.
After his poem celebrating the victory of Fontenoy in 1745, he was appointed historiographer, a gentleman of the king’s chamber, and academician. His tragedy Mérope, about the mythical Greek queen, won public acclaim on the first night in 1743. The performance of Mahomet, in which Voltaire presented the founder of Islam as an imposter, was forbidden, however, after its successful production in 1742.
He amassed a vast fortune through the manipulations of Joseph Pâris Duverney, the financier in charge of military supplies, who was favoured by Mme de Pompadour. Yet he was not spared disappointments. Louis XV disliked him, and the pious Catholic faction at court remained acutely hostile. He was guilty of indiscretions. He was forced to go into hiding at the country mansion as the guest of the duchesse du Maine in 1747.
Ill and exhausted by his restless existence, he at last discovered the literary form that ideally fitted his lively and disillusioned temper: he wrote his first contes (stories). Micromégas (1752) measures the littleness of man in the cosmic scale. Vision de Babouc (1748) and Memnon (1749) dispute the philosophic optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Zadig (1747) is a kind of allegorical autobiography: like Voltaire, the Babylonian sage Zadig suffers persecution, is pursued by ill fortune, and ends by doubting the tender care of Providence for human beings.
The great crisis of his life was drawing near. The failure of some of his plays aggravated his sense of defeat. He had attempted the comédie larmoyante, or sentimental comedy, that was then fashionable, after L’Enfant prodigue (1736), a variation of the prodigal son theme, he adapted William Wycherley’s satiric Restoration drama The Plain-Dealer to his purpose, entitling it La Prude, he based Nanine (1749) on a situation taken from Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, but all without success. The court spectacles he directed gave him a taste for scenic effects, and he contrived a sumptuous decor, as well as the apparition of a ghost, for Sémiramis in 1748 but his public was not captivated.
Exasperated and disappointed, he yielded to the pressing invitation of Frederick II and set out for Berlin on June 28, 1750. At first he was enchanted by his sojourn in Berlin and Potsdam, but soon difficulties arose. After a lawsuit with a moneylender and quarrels with prominent noblemen, he started a controversy with Maupertuis, the president of Frederick’s academy of science, the Berlin Academy, on scientific matters. In a pamphlet entitled Diatribe du docteur Akakia in 1752, he covered him with ridicule.
Voltaire left Prussia on March 26, 1753. On the journey, he was held under house arrest at an inn at Frankfurt by order of the Prussian resident. Louis XV forbade him to approach Paris. Not knowing where to turn, he stayed at Colmar for more than a year. At length he found asylum at Geneva, where he purchased a house called Les Délices, at the same time securing winter quarters at Lausanne.
Voltaire now completed his two major historical studies. Le Siècle de Louis XIV in 1751, a book on the century of Louis XIV, had been prepared after an exhaustive 20-year interrogation of the survivors of le grand siècle and The Essai sur les moeurs, the study on customs and morals that he had begun in 1740, traces the course of world history since the end of the Roman Empire and gives an important place to the Eastern and Far Eastern countries. He supplemented these two works with one on Russian history during the reign of Peter the Great, Histoire de l’empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand in 1759 - 63, the Philosophie de l’histoire in 1765, and the Précis du siècle de Louis XV in 1768.
At Geneva, Voltaire had at first been welcomed and honored as the champion of tolerance. But soon he made those around him feel uneasy. Then there was his mock-heroic poem La Pucelle in 1755, a most improper presentation of Joan of Arc, La Pucelle d’Orléans, which the booksellers printed in spite of his protests.
Attracted by his volatile intelligence, Calvinist pastors as well as women and young people thronged to his salon. Yet he soon provoked the hostility of important Swiss intellectuals. The storm broke in November 1757, when volume seven of Diderot’s Encyclopédie was published. Voltaire had inspired the article on Geneva that his fellow philosopher Jean d’Alembert had written after a visit to Les Délices; not only was the city of Calvin asked to build a theatre within its walls but also certain of its pastors were praised for their doubts of Christ’s divinity. The scandal sparked a quick response: the Encyclopédie was forced to interrupt publication, and Rousseau attacked the rational philosophy of the Philosophes in general in a polemical treatise on the question of the morality of theatrical performances, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758). Rousseau’s view that drama might well be abolished marked a final break between the two writers.
Voltaire no longer felt safe in Geneva, and he longed to retire from these quarrels. In 1758 he wrote what was to be his most famous work, Candide. Having retired with his companions to the shores of the Propontis, he discovered that the secret of happiness was “to cultivate one’s garden,” a practical philosophy excluding excessive idealism and nebulous metaphysics. Voltaire’s own garden became Ferney, a property he bought at the end of 1758, together with Tourney in France, on the Swiss border. By crossing the frontier he could thus safeguard himself against police incursion from either country.
At Ferney, Voltaire entered on one of the most active periods of his life. Both patriarch and lord of the manor, he developed a modern estate, sharing in the movement of agricultural reform in which the aristocracy was interested at the time. His fame was now worldwide. "Innkeeper of Europe," as he was called, he welcomed such literary figures as James Boswell, Giovanni Casanova, Edward Gibbon, the Prince de Ligne, and the fashionable philosophers of Paris. He kept up an enormous correspondence with the philosophes, with his actresses and actors, and with those high in court circles, such as the duc de Richelieu, the duc de Choiseul, and Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s favorite. He busied himself with political economy and revived his interest in metaphysics by absorbing the ideas of 17th-century philosophers Benedict de Spinoza and Nicolas Malebranche.
His main interest at this time, however, was his opposition to l’infâme, a word he used to designate the church, especially when it was identified with intolerance. He multiplied his personal attacks, often stooping to low cunning, in his sentimental comedy L’Écossaise (1760), he mimicked the eminent critic Élie Fréron, who had attacked him in reviews, by portraying his adversary as a rascally journalist who intervenes in a quarrel between two Scottish families. He directed Le Sentiment des citoyens (1764) against Rousseau. As an author he used all kinds of pseudonyms, Rabbi Akib, Pastor Bourn, Lord Bolingbroke, M. Mamaki, interpreter of Oriental languages to the king of England, Clocpitre, Cubstorf, Jean Plokof. As a part-time scholar he constructed a personal Encyclopédie, the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), enlarged after 1770 by Questions sur l’Encyclopédie. Among the mass of writings of this period are Le Blanc et le noir, a philosophical tale in which Oriental fantasy contrasts with the realism of Jeannot et Colin, Princesse de Babylone, a panorama of European philosophies in the fairyland of The Thousand and One Nights; and Le Taureau blanc, a biblical tale.
As a writer, he wanted to halt a development he deplored that which led to Romanticism. He tried to save theatrical tragedy by making concessions to a public that adored scenes of violence and exoticism. For instance, in L’Orphelin de la Chine (1755), Lekain (Henri-Louis Cain), who played the part of Genghis Khan, was clad in a sensational Mongol costume. Lekain, whom Voltaire considered the greatest tragedian of his time, also played the title role of Tancrède, which was produced with a sumptuous decor (1760) and which proved to be Voltaire’s last triumph. Subsequent tragedies, arid and ill-constructed and overweighted with philosophic propaganda, were either booed off the stage or not produced at all.
He became alarmed at the increasing influence of Shakespeare, when he gave a home to a grandniece of the great 17th-century classical dramatist Pierre Corneille and on her behalf published an annotated edition of the famous tragic author, he inserted, after Cinna, a translation of Julius Caesar, convinced that such a confrontation would demonstrate the superiority of the French dramatist. He was infuriated by the Shakespearean translations of Pierre Le Tourneur in 1776, which stimulated French appreciation of this more robust, nonclassical dramatist, and dispatched an abusive Lettre à l’Académie. He never ceased to acknowledge a degree of genius in Shakespeare, yet spoke of him as "a drunken savage." He returned to a strict classicism in his last plays, but in vain, for the audacities of his own previous tragedies, timid as they were, had paved the way for Romantic drama.
It was the theatre that brought Voltaire's back to Paris in 1778. Wishing to direct the rehearsals of Irène, he made his triumphal return to the city he had not seen for 28 years on February 10. More than 300 persons called on him the day after his arrival. On March 30 he went to the Académie amid acclamations, and, when Irène was played before a delirious audience, he was crowned in his box. His health was profoundly impaired by all this excitement. On May 18 he was stricken with uremia. On the 30th of May, he died.
Views
Embracing Enlightenment philosophers such as Isaac Newton, John Locke and Francis Bacon, Voltaire found inspiration in their ideals of a free and liberal society, along with freedom of religion and free commerce. The main themes of his works are the establishment of religious tolerance, the growth of material prosperity, respect for the rights of man by the abolition of torture and useless punishments.
Voltaire was a polygenist who speculated that each race had entirely separate origins. According to William Cohen, like most other polygenists, Voltaire believed that because of their different origins blacks did not entirely share the natural humanity of whites. According to David Allen Harvey, Voltaire often invoked racial differences as a means to attack religious orthodoxy, and the Biblical account of creation.
His most famous remark on slavery is found in Candide, where the hero is horrified to learn "at what price we eat sugar in Europe" after coming across a slave in French Guinea who has been mutilated for escaping, who opines that, if all human beings have common origins as the Bible taught, it makes them cousins, concluding that "no one could treat their relatives more horribly". Elsewhere, he wrote caustically about "whites and Christians [who] proceed to purchase negroes cheaply, in order to sell them dear in America". Voltaire has been accused of supporting the slave trade as per a letter attributed to him, although it has been suggested that this letter is a forgery "since no satisfying source attests to the letter's existence."
Quotations:
"If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize."
"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."
"The mirror is a worthless invention. The only way to truly see yourself is in the reflection of someone else's eyes."
"The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom."
"Give me the patience for the small things of life, courage for the great trials of life. Help me to do my best each day and then go to sleep knowing God is awake."
"Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason."
"Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills."
"In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another."
"The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing."