OLL’s November Birthday: Voltaire (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778)

November’s OLL Birthday Essay is in honor of François Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire.  A playwright, poet, historian, philosopher, and satirist, Voltaire literally defined the Age of Enlightenment, sometimes called simply the Age of Voltaire.  Throughout his life, he was an indefatigable foe of all forms of tyranny and oppression, and a champion of free expression and freedom of religion. 

He was born in Paris, the youngest of five children, to a father who was a lawyer and minor government official, and a mother who was from the lower ranking nobility.  From 1704-1711 he received a good classical education at a Jesuit college.  While at school he decided that he wanted to become a writer, despite his father’s plans for him to go into the law.  Upon his graduation, his father duly got him a job with a notary in Paris and then enrolled him in law school in Caen, but François Marie lacked any interest in either position and spent most of his time writing poetry. He also started to make a name for himself among the aristocracy, with whom he mingled, who admired his charm and wit.  On the other hand, his satirical (though witty) poems, frequently aimed at the high nobility and/or government officials, led to a number of imprisonments, including eleven months in the Bastille.

While incarcerated in the Bastille, he completed a play, Oedipe, (a version of the Oedipus story) which debuted in 1718.  It was an instant hit and established his reputation as a great writer.  

The play was also the first work he published under the name Voltaire.  The origins of this name are not clear.  The main theory is that it is an anagram of the Latin version of his surname (Arovet) plus “li” (for le jeune [the young]).  Others have noted that “Voltaire” resembles words such as voltage (acrobatics), and other verbs and adjectives connected to motion.  It is worth mentioning in this context that Voltaire used some 178 different pen names throughout his life.

By the time Oedipe was produced Voltaire had already become an outspoken advocate for individual liberty and religious toleration.  In 1723 he found a publisher, with great difficulty, for an epic poem about King Henry IV of France (r.1589-1610), who issued the Edict of Nantes (1598).  In Voltaire’s poem, La Henriade, King Henry is portrayed as a national hero and brave defender of religious freedom who saves France from the horrors of the wars of religion.  It was extremely popular, eventually going through 65 editions, and was translated into several languages.  

Shortly after its publication, Voltaire once again found himself falling afoul of a powerful aristocrat as a result of some satirical verses.  This led to a beating by his thugs, followed by serious threats of imprisonment. Voltaire instead petitioned the authorities to send him into exile in England, which they accepted.  So it was that Voltaire spent 1726-1729 in England, an experience that made a profound impression on him.  Already and advocate of tolerance, individual liberty, and constitutional government, Voltaire was deeply and favorably impressed by what he found in England.  While there, he got to know most of the luminaries of the time, including Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, and with the work of John Locke and Sir Issac Newton, among others.

He was eventually allowed to return to France, and after a time moved back to Paris.  Some clever business deals during this period assured his future economic security.  In 1733 he published Letters concerning the English Nation in London.  The following year it was published (without approval by the royal censor) in France as Lettres Philosophiques.  Drawing on his experiences in England, the book was a thoroughgoing celebration of English constitutional monarchy, religious toleration, and the scientific method he saw in such men as Francis Bacon and Newton. The French authorities recognized immediately the book’s (thinly) veiled criticism of absolutist France and banned it ordering, for good measure, that all copies be publicly burned.  The Parisian authorities issued a warrant for his arrest.

Luckily for Voltaire, he was rescued by a woman he had befriended only a short time earlier, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), an accomplished mathematician and philosopher, and mother of three children.  She invited him to stay at her dilapidated chateau in Cirey, in Lorraine, which Voltaire refurbished and restored at his own expense.  He spent the next 16 years living there with the Mme. du Châtelet, during which time they became lovers and intellectual companions, collaborating on numerous projects, among them a translation of Newtown’s Principia Mathematica.  Émilie’s husband was rarely around, but when he was the three of them seemed to have gotten along remarkably well.  

During their time together, the two engaged in various scientific experiments inspired by Newton’s work, and also embarked on various investigations of religion, yielding works that criticized metaphysics and miracles, yet which adhered to a Deist understanding of religion.  During his years at Cirey Voltaire also developed his skills as a historian, embarking on a major world history project.  

During their later years together, Émilie and Voltaire drifted apart romantically though they remained very close and continued their scholarly collaborations.  Mme du Châtelet had an affair with a poet, then with the exiled king of Poland, Stanislas Leszczynski, the Duke of Lorraine, at whose palace she died in childbirth in 1749.  All three of her former lovers and her husband were with her at her deathbed.  

Voltaire, crushed emotionally and physically exhausted, moved into a house in Paris he had bought with Émilie years earlier.  He apparently had a mental breakdown of some kind, and would sometimes wander the streets in the middle of the night shouting her name.  

While recovering from the trauma of the death of his friend and lover, Voltaire received an invitation from King Frederick II (called “The Great”) of Prussia, whom he had met briefly some years earlier.  Voltaire spent three years in Berlin as an honored guest of the famous “Enlightened Despot” who showered him with honors and money, but in 1753 the two men had a falling out and Voltaire returned to France.  

While much of the French aristocracy and many of the philosophes lionized him, King Louis XV was suspicious of his liberalizing writings, and the Church was by this time an implacable foe.  Not knowing exactly where to go, Voltaire moved to Geneva where he bought a fine house called Les Délices.  He resumed writing, including submissions to the Encyclopédie on history and, fatefully, Geneva. The dour Calvinist aristocracy of the City Republic had anyway mixed feelings about hosting their illustrious though questionable guest, and Voltaire’s encyclopedia entry on Geneva, wherein he noted the brutal intolerance of its Calvinist leaders was the last straw.  Voltaire thought it best to leave Geneva, and in 1758 bought an estate called Ferney, right over the border in France.  (It was renamed Ferney-Voltaire in 1791)  He lived comfortably there the rest of his life.  He passed his time devising and implementing various progressive and humanitarian reforms for the workers on his property, and receiving visits from his numerous admirers from all over Europe.  It was here also that he published his most famous work Candide (1759), based in part of the conversations he had shared with Mme. du Chatelet on the Optimist philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) many years earlier.  Two other important works date from this time.  One was his important essay Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) in which he discusses the horrible 1755 Lisbon earthquake, arguing that it was not a punishment from God (as many were arguing)but a natural disaster.  The other was Traité sur la Tolérance (1763), an argument for religious tolerance, written as part of his work rehabilitating a wrongly executed Calvinist merchant by a court of Catholic judges.      

Towards the end of his life he worked on a number of historical works, but continued to write plays as well.  In 1778 he returned to Paris after an absence of over 25 years for the premiere of his play Irene. Votaire received a rapturous reception in Paris.  Too ill and weak to attend the opening night of the play, he finally made it to the theatre for the next performance where he was lionized by the cast and audience.  The excitement was too much for the old man.  He quickly grew weaker and weaker.  Accounts of his death are numerous and contradictory, with some suggesting that he accepted last rites, and others that he refused them.  One famous story relates that when the attending priest asked him if he renounced Satan, Voltaire replied, “this is not the time to be making new enemies.”  Because of his well-known antipathy for the Church, he was denied a Christian burial.  But friends secretly arranged for him to be buried in the Abbey of Scellières, in Champagne, where a family friend was the Abbot.  Years later, in 1791, the Revolutionary government reburied his remains with extraordinary honors and ceremony in the Pantheon in Paris.  A million people reportedly attended the funeral procession through the city.  

Voltaire’s contribution to literature, philosophy, and the study of liberty cannot be overstated.  A towering figure in the arts, philosophy, and the embryonic social sciences, he stood before all else as an outspoken defender of individual liberty and an implacable foe of tyranny and impression in all its forms.  “Écrasez l’infâme!” “Crush the infamous thing,” was how he signed his correspondence.  He spent his life trying to crush the infamous horrors of cruelty, oppression, and superstition that he saw as the sources of pain and misery to humankind.