Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet, son of a Paris notary, was born in 1694 and educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. His wit got him into trouble early: satirical verses about the Regent sent him to the Bastille for eleven months (1717–18), where he wrote his first tragedy, Œdipe, and adopted the name “Voltaire”. After a quarrel with the aristocrat Chevalier de Rohan, who had him beaten by servants, he was sent back to the Bastille and then into exile in England (1726–28) — a turning point. He admired English freedom of speech, religious toleration, Newton’s science and Locke’s philosophy, and his Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English, 1733) — praising England to shame France — was burned by the public hangman.

He lived for fifteen years at Cirey with the brilliant mathematician Émilie du Châtelet, translator of Newton; spent three stormy years at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia; and from 1758 lived at Ferney, near the Swiss border (so he could flee either way), as the “patriarch of Ferney”, running an estate, a watch factory, and a European correspondence. He returned to Paris in triumph in 1778, aged eighty-three, was crowned with laurel at the theatre, and died weeks later.

Candide

Candide, or Optimism (1759) is a philosophical tale written in three days, perhaps, and one of the funniest books ever written. Candide, a naïve young man raised in a Westphalian castle by the philosopher Pangloss — who teaches that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” (a parody of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and of Alexander Pope) — is expelled for kissing the baron’s daughter Cunégonde and endures catastrophe after catastrophe: conscription and flogging, war, shipwreck, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (which killed tens of thousands on All Saints’ Day as they sat in church), the Inquisition, slavery, robbery. Pangloss is hanged, dissected, and survives, still insisting on optimism. See Candide.

It ends on a farm near Constantinople, where an old Turk tells them that work keeps away three great evils — boredom, vice and need. Candide’s last words: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” — “we must cultivate our garden.”

The fight against l’infâme

Voltaire’s slogan, “Écrasez l’infâme!” — “crush the infamous thing” — targeted superstition, fanaticism, and the persecuting Church. His most famous campaign was for Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse executed in 1762 on the wheel for supposedly murdering his son to stop him converting to Catholicism. Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763) and three years of agitation won Calas’s posthumous exoneration. He also campaigned for the Sirven family and for the young Chevalier de La Barre, executed for blasphemy.

Deism

Voltaire was not an atheist but a deist: the order of the universe proves a designer — “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” — but revealed religion, miracles, and priestly power are impostures. His Philosophical Dictionary (1764) mocked the Bible, theology and clerical absurdity.

Using Voltaire in conversation

• On optimism: Pangloss — all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
• On doing something useful: “We must cultivate our garden.”
• On God: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
• On free speech: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — Hall’s summary, not Voltaire’s words.