19.4.4: Voltaire

Introduction: Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet, known by his literary pseudonym Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state.

He was born in Paris in 1694 and educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704-1711). By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided he wanted to be a writer, against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to become a lawyer. Under his father’s pressure, he studied law but he continued to write, producing essays and historical studies. In 1713, his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to a French ambassador in the Netherlands, but Voltaire was forced to return to France after a scandalous affair. From early on, he had trouble with the authorities over his critiques of the government. These activities were to result in two imprisonments and a temporary exile to England. One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused Philippe II, Duke of Orléans,of incest with his own daughter, led to an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille (after which he adopted the name Voltaire). He mainly argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. He campaigned to eradicate priestly and aristocratic-monarchical authority, and supported a constitutional monarchy that protects people’s rights.

Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of several liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

Political and Philosophical Views

Voltaire’s political and philosophical views can be found in nearly all of his prose writings, even in what would be typically categorized as fiction. Most of his prose, including such genres as romance, drama, or satire, was written as polemics with the goal of conveying radical political and philosophical messages. His works, especially private letters, frequently contain the word “l’infâme” and the expression “écrasez l’infâme,” or “crush the infamous.” The phrase refers to abuses of the people by royalty and the clergy that Voltaire saw around him, and the superstition and intolerance that the clergy bred within the people. Voltaire’s first major philosophical work in his battle against “l’infâme” was The Treatise on Tolerance (1763), in which he calls for tolerance between religions and targets religious fanaticism, especially that of the Jesuits, indicting all superstitions surrounding religions. The book was quickly banned. Only a year later, he published The Philosophical Dictionary—an encyclopedic dictionary with alphabetically arranged articles that criticize the Roman Catholic Church and other institutions. In it, Voltaire is concerned with the injustices of the Catholic Church, which he sees as intolerant and fanatical. At the same time, he espouses deism, tolerance, and freedom of the press. The Dictionary was Voltaire’s lifelong project, modified and expanded with each edition. It represents the culmination of his views on Christianity, God, morality, and other subjects.

Voltaire as Historian

Voltaire had an enormous influence on the development of historiography through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past. His best-known historiography works are The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and The Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). Voltaire broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history, and achievements in the arts and sciences. The Essay traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, thereby rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. Voltaire was also the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks and emphasizing economics, culture, and political history. He treated Europe as a whole, rather than a collection of nations. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval culture to Middle Eastern civilization, and consistently exposed the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages.

Views on the Society

In his criticism of the French society and existing social structures, Voltaire hardly spared anyone. He perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. He long thought only an enlightened monarch could bring about change, given the social structures of the time and the extremely high rates of illiteracy, and that it was in the king’s rational interest to improve the education and welfare of his subjects. But his disappointments and disillusions with Frederick the Great changed his philosophy and soon gave birth to one of his most enduring works, his novella Candide, or Optimism (1759), which ends with a new conclusion: “It is up to us to cultivate our garden.”

He is remembered and honored in France as a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought for civil rights (as the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion), and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the Ancien Régime. The Ancien Régime involved an unfair balance of power and taxes between the three Estates: clergy and nobles on one side, the commoners and middle class, who were burdened with most of the taxes, on the other.

Attributions

• Voltaire
  • “Age of Enlightenment.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Voltaire.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Deism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Treatise on Tolerance.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatise_on_Tolerance. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Dictionnaire philosophique.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_philosophique. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Ancien Régime.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_R%C3%A9gime. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Nicolas_de_Largillière_François-Marie_Arouet_dit_Voltaire_vers_1724-1725_-001.jpg.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire#/media/File:Nicolas_de_Largilli%C3%A8re,_Fran%C3%A7ois-Marie_Arouet_dit_Voltaire_(vers_1724-1725)_-001.jpg. Wikipedia Public domain.