Voltaire

Chapter 1 · The Notary's Son Who Renamed Himself

Jesuit schooling, satire and the Bastille

1694 – 1726 · Paris · Bastille

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris on 21 November 1694, the son of a prosperous notary who intended him for the law. He was sent to the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he received a superb classical education from teachers whose religion he would spend the rest of his life attacking — a debt he acknowledged and an irony he enjoyed.

He wanted to write, his father objected, and he wrote anyway: witty, obscene, politically reckless verses that circulated in manuscript around Paris. In 1717 some satirical lines about the Regent's private life earned him eleven months in the Bastille. He used the time to finish a tragedy, *Œdipe*, which was a hit on its release in 1718, and to adopt the name Voltaire — an invention whose derivation is still argued over, and which announced that he had made himself rather than inherited a place.

Success did not make him safe. In 1726 he traded insults with the Chevalier de Rohan, an aristocrat who had him beaten by hired servants while he watched from a carriage. When Voltaire sought a duel, he was arrested — because a commoner could not demand satisfaction from a nobleman — and given a choice between the Bastille and exile.

He chose England. The episode taught him something he never forgot: that in France, wit and fame counted for nothing against birth, and that the law protected rank rather than justice.

Why this matters

The Rohan beating turned a successful court poet into a lifelong critic of privilege — a personal humiliation that became a political principle.

You have met the young satirist and the beating that changed him. What would you ask him?

Ask Voltaire

• “What did the Jesuits give you that you never lost?”
• “Why did you invent the name Voltaire?”
• “What did the Rohan affair teach you about the law?”
• “How did you write in prison without being crushed by it?”
• “Why was satire so dangerous in eighteenth-century France?”

Chapter 2 · England, Newton and the Château at Cirey

Learning science from a mathematician he lived with

1726 – 1749 · London · Cirey

Two and a half years in England reorganised Voltaire's mind. He found a country where a merchant could be respected, where Dissenters and Quakers worshipped unmolested, where Newton had been buried with state honours, and where writers could criticise ministers without a warrant arriving. He learned English well enough to read Shakespeare and Locke, and attended Newton's funeral procession.

The *Lettres philosophiques* of 1734 reported all this to France as praise of England — and therefore as an attack on France by implication. The book was condemned and publicly burned, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

He fled to Cirey, on the border of Lorraine, to the château of Émilie du Châtelet. Their fifteen years together were the most productive of his life and belong to her as much as to him. Du Châtelet was a formidable mathematician and physicist in her own right: she produced the French translation of Newton's *Principia* with a commentary that made the mathematics comprehensible, and it remains the standard French version. She also worked on energy, arguing for the significance of a quantity proportional to mass times velocity squared.

Together they built a laboratory, ran experiments on the nature of fire and light, and argued constantly. Voltaire's *Elements of the Philosophy of Newton* (1738) introduced Newtonian physics to French readers who had been taught Descartes. Du Châtelet died in 1749, days after childbirth, and he wrote that he had not lost a mistress but half of himself.

Why this matters

Voltaire helped make Newton's physics French — and did so in partnership with Émilie du Châtelet, whose translation and commentary were the more lasting scientific contribution of the two.

You have seen the years of science and collaboration. What would you ask him?

Ask Voltaire

• “What impressed you most about England?”
• “Why was praising England treated as an attack on France?”
• “What did Émilie du Châtelet contribute that you could not?”
• “Why did Newton's ideas need defending in France?”
• “What did you actually do in the laboratory at Cirey?”

Chapter 3 · Candide and the Earthquake

A disaster that broke a philosophy

1755 – 1759 · Lisbon · Geneva · Ferney

On 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, an enormous earthquake destroyed Lisbon. Churches full of worshippers collapsed, fire spread, and a tsunami followed; tens of thousands died. Voltaire was shaken into a *Poem on the Lisbon Disaster* that attacked the fashionable philosophical optimism — associated with Leibniz and popularised by Pope's line that whatever is, is right — which held that this is the best of all possible worlds and apparent evils serve a hidden good.

Rousseau replied that the deaths were caused by people choosing to build tall houses in crowded cities, not by providence, and that optimism was a consolation for the suffering. Voltaire thought the answer glib.

*Candide*, published in 1759, is his settlement of the argument. A naive young man is taught by Doctor Pangloss that everything happens for the best, then travels through war, the Inquisition, the Lisbon earthquake, slavery, rape and shipwreck while Pangloss continues explaining that all is well. The most quoted passage in modern editions is the encounter with an enslaved man in Surinam, mutilated under the sugar code, who observes flatly that this is the price of the sugar eaten in Europe.

The book ends not with an answer but with an instruction — that we must cultivate our garden — which readers have argued about ever since: retreat from the world, or the modest practical work that actually improves it.

It was banned almost everywhere and sold in enormous numbers.

“That is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe.”

— Candide, chapter 19, 1759 — the enslaved man of Surinam

Why this matters

Candide is the sharpest attack in European literature on explaining away suffering — and it uses satire rather than argument because Voltaire believed laughter did the damage reason could not.

You have the great satire in front of you. What would you ask him about it?

Ask Voltaire

• “Why did the Lisbon earthquake shake your beliefs so badly?”
• “What is wrong with saying everything happens for the best?”
• “What did you want readers to feel at the sugar plantation in Surinam?”
• “What does 'we must cultivate our garden' actually mean?”
• “Why use a comic novel rather than a philosophical treatise?”

Chapter 4 · The Calas Affair

Inventing the public campaign for justice

1762 – 1766 · Toulouse · Ferney

In 1761 Marc-Antoine Calas was found dead in his family's house in Toulouse. His father Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant in a fiercely Catholic city, was accused of murdering him to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. The evidence was almost non-existent; the atmosphere was not. In March 1762 Jean Calas was broken on the wheel, strangled and burned, protesting his innocence to the end.

Voltaire, sixty-eight and living safely at Ferney on the Swiss border, took up the case and ran it for three years. He interviewed the family, commissioned legal opinions, published the *Treatise on Tolerance* in 1763, and orchestrated pamphlets and letters until the case became impossible to ignore across Europe. In 1765 the royal council quashed the verdict and declared Calas innocent; the family received compensation.

He did the same for the Sirven family, also Protestants wrongly accused, and campaigned over the Chevalier de La Barre, a nineteen-year-old executed in 1766 for blasphemy — for failing to remove his hat before a religious procession and for owning a copy of Voltaire's own dictionary, which was burned with him. That case he lost.

His slogan for the whole campaign was *Écrasez l'infâme* — crush the infamous thing — by which he meant not religion as such but institutional fanaticism and persecution. He himself remained a deist who thought belief in a creator socially necessary.

Why this matters

The Calas campaign created the model of the public intellectual: a writer using publicity and public opinion to overturn a judicial decision, a tactic used ever since in miscarriage-of-justice cases.

You have seen a wrongful execution reversed. What would you ask him about the campaign?

Ask Voltaire

• “How did you overturn a verdict from a safe distance across the border?”
• “What did you mean by 'crush the infamous thing'?”
• “What did it do to you when La Barre was executed with your book?”
• “Did you believe in God, and what kind?”
• “Why did you settle at Ferney, right on the border?”

Chapter 5 · Triumph in Paris, and the Awkward Record

A quotation he never wrote, and prejudices he did

1778 and after · Paris · Panthéon

In February 1778, after twenty-eight years away, Voltaire returned to Paris. He was eighty-three. Crowds followed his carriage; his play *Irène* was performed and he was crowned with laurel in the theatre; Benjamin Franklin brought his grandson for a blessing. The excitement almost certainly hastened his death on 30 May 1778. Because of his known hostility to the Church, burial was difficult and his nephew arranged it hastily at an abbey before the prohibition could take effect. In 1791 the revolutionary government moved his remains to the Panthéon in a vast procession.

Two corrections belong here. The sentence most often attributed to him — that he disapproves of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it — is not his. It was written in 1906 by his English biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of his attitude, and later mistaken for a quotation.

The second correction is harder. Voltaire campaigned for toleration and simultaneously wrote passages about Jews in the *Dictionnaire philosophique* that are straightforwardly antisemitic, and he held investments connected to colonial trade whose profits depended on enslaved labour, despite the Surinam passage in *Candide*. Historians disagree about how to weigh these against his campaigns, but the record includes them.

His lasting bequest is a stance rather than a system: that no institution is above ridicule, and that a writer's proper job is to make injustice inconvenient.

Why this matters

Voltaire is the origin of the modern idea that public opinion can be mobilised against official injustice — and also a case study in why we should check quotations and read a thinker's whole record.

You have reached the triumph and the qualifications. What would you ask him?

Ask Voltaire

• “Why is the famous free-speech quotation attributed to you not yours?”
• “How do you answer readers who point to your writing about Jews?”
• “Did you profit from trade built on enslaved labour?”
• “What did the reception in Paris in 1778 mean to you?”
• “What should a writer do when the law is clearly wrong?”

What Voltaire changed

Voltaire established freedom of expression, religious toleration and judicial fairness as causes a writer could campaign on, and the Calas case gave Europe its first successful media campaign against a miscarriage of justice. His histories also helped shift the writing of history from kings and battles toward commerce, culture and manners.

A debate that continues

Scholars disagree about how consistent Voltaire's toleration really was, given his antisemitic passages and his links to colonial commerce — and about whether his deism was sincere or a socially prudent position.

Keep exploring — ask Voltaire

• “How did living on a border shape what you dared to publish?”
• “What did satire achieve that argument could not?”
• “Which injustice of your own time do you think you failed to confront?”

Related lives

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Citizen · Father of Romanticism
• Frederick the Great — Frederick II · The Great · Der Alte Fritz
• Benjamin Franklin — Printer · Diplomat · Philosopher

Related themes

The Enlightenment · Freedom of expression · Religious toleration and persecution