From the Bastille to England
Francois-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694, a notary's son who chose wit over law and paid for it early: verses mocking the regent put him in the Bastille at twenty-three, where he adopted the name Voltaire. A quarrel with an aristocrat, who had him beaten and jailed again, drove him to England from 1726 to 1728. There he watched a country where merchants had standing, sects coexisted, and Newton was buried like a king. His Letters on the English of 1733 held that mirror up to France; the book was banned and burned, and it circulated all the faster.
Voltaire never depended on patrons alone, because he made himself rich. With the mathematician La Condamine he calculated that a badly designed government lottery paid out more than its tickets cost, and a syndicate of friends bought it out systematically. Shrewd investments and lending made him one of Europe's wealthiest writers, and biographers still argue over parts of that fortune, including holdings in overseas trading companies entangled with the colonial economy. Money bought him what he valued most: the independence to publish, flee, and publish again.
Candide and the Infamous Thing
For fifteen years his intellectual life was anchored at Cirey with Emilie du Chatelet, the physicist whose French translation of Newton's Principia, with her own commentary, is still standard; she was his collaborator and equal, and her death in 1749 devastated him. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands on a church holiday, sharpened his quarrel with optimism. Candide, dashed off in 1759, follows an amiable innocent through war, rape, slavery, and shipwreck while a philosopher insists all is for the best. Europe laughed, and something in complacent theodicy never recovered.
From his estate at Ferney, safely near the Swiss border, the old man became a one-man human rights campaign under the war cry Ecrasez l'infame, crush the infamous thing, by which he meant fanaticism and persecution. When the Protestant merchant Jean Calas was tortured and executed at Toulouse in 1762 on the absurd charge of murdering his son to prevent a conversion, Voltaire mobilized pamphlets, lawyers, and public opinion across Europe until the verdict was annulled in 1765 and the family compensated. He repeated the exercise for other victims of judicial cruelty.
The Contradictions of a Champion
Honesty requires the whole ledger. Voltaire's writings contain crude antisemitic passages and disparaging remarks about Africans that were noxious even by his century's standards, and his campaign against organized religion could shade into contempt for believers themselves. He flattered despots when it suited him, spending three years at the court of Frederick the Great before the friendship exploded. He was vain, vindictive in literary quarrels, and careless of lesser writers he crushed. The man who taught Europe to demand tolerance did not always extend it, a contradiction his admirers have argued about ever since.
In 1778, aged eighty-three, he returned to Paris after nearly three decades away and was mobbed like a modern celebrity; the excitement may have hastened his death that May. Denied Christian burial, he was interred by friends before the ban arrived, and in 1791 the Revolution moved his remains to the Pantheon in a vast procession. His hundred-odd volumes are little read now, Candide excepted. What endures is a posture: the insistence that cruelty dressed as piety deserves not reverence but laughter, and that a single pen can make injustice famous.
