Voltaire

Life

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary, and educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. He was expected to go into the law and instead went into literature and trouble. Verses satirizing the Regent earned him eleven months in the Bastille in 1717 and 1718; he came out with a tragedy, Oedipe, that made his name, and with the pen name Voltaire. A quarrel with a nobleman in 1726 led to a second imprisonment and then exile in England, where he spent nearly three years, learned the language, and absorbed the ideas of Newton and Locke and the relative freedom of English political and religious life.

The Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733, in French 1734) praised all of this at France’s expense and was burned by the public hangman. Voltaire withdrew to Cirey in Champagne, the estate of Émilie du Châtelet, a mathematician and physicist with whom he lived and worked for fifteen years. After her death in 1749 he accepted the long-standing invitation of Frederick the Great and spent three years at the Prussian court in Potsdam before the two fell out. Barred from Paris, he eventually settled in 1759 at Ferney, just inside France on the Swiss border, where he spent his last twenty years running a model estate, writing constantly, and conducting public campaigns on behalf of victims of judicial and religious persecution, most famously the Calas family. He returned to Paris in 1778 to a hero’s welcome, and died there a few weeks later at eighty-three.

Literary significance

Voltaire was the most famous writer in eighteenth-century Europe and the central public figure of the French Enlightenment. He wrote in every form: tragedies that held the stage for a century, epic and light verse, histories (The Age of Louis XIV, the Essay on the Manners of Nations) that helped invent cultural history, the Philosophical Dictionary, tens of thousands of letters, and the short philosophical tales of which Candide (1759) is the best known. His targets were religious intolerance, judicial cruelty and dogmatic metaphysics, and his weapons were clarity, speed and ridicule. The tragedies are now rarely performed, but Candide, Zadig and the Philosophical Dictionary are read everywhere, and his name has become a byword for free thought and for the Enlightenment itself.

Where to start

Candide is in our catalog and is where almost everyone starts; it takes an afternoon. Zadig and Micromégas, among the other tales, follow naturally, and the Philosophical Dictionary can be read in any order.