Voltaire was born in
Paris
to François Arouet and Marie-Marguerite Daumart or D'Aumard.
Both parents were of
Poitevin
extraction, but the Arouets were long established in Paris,
the grandfather being a prosperous tradesman.
He was the fifth
child of his parents, preceded by twin boys (one of whom
survived), a girl, Marguerite-Catherine, and another boy who
died young. Voltaire's mother died when he was seven years old.
His father appears to have been strict, but neither
inhospitable nor tyrannical. Marguerite Arouet, of whom her
younger brother was very fond, married early; the elder
brother, Armand, was a strong
Jansenist
and had a poor relationship with François.
The Abbé de
Châteauneuf,
a friend of François' mother, instructed him in les belles
lettres and deism, and the child showed a faculty for
facile verse-making. Aged ten he was sent to the
Jesuitic
Collège Louis-le-Grand, and remained there till
1711.
Though he depreciated the education he had received, it formed
the basis of his considerable
knowledge,
and probably kindled his lifelong devotion to the stage.
In his earliest
school years the abbé presented him to the famous author
Ninon de Lenclos.
When she died, in
1705,
she left him money so he could buy books. In August
1711,
at the age of seventeen, he came home and the usual battle
followed between a son who desired no profession but
literature
and a father who refused to consider literature a profession
at all so Voltaire studied
law, at
least nominally. The Abbé de Châteauneuf died before his
godson left school, but he had already introduced him to the
famous and dissipated coterie of the Temple, of which the
grand prior
Vendôme was the head, and the poets
Chaulieu
and La Fare were the chief literary stars. Voltaire's father
tried to remove him from such society by sending him first to
Caen
and then, in the suite of the marquis de Châteauneuf, the
abbé's brother, to
The Hague.
Here he met Olympe Dunoyer, a
Protestant
girl from a poor family, but his father stopped the affair by
procuring a
lettre de cachet,
though he never used it.
Voltaire was sent
home and, for a time, pretended to work in a Parisian lawyer's
office but he again manifested a faculty for getting into
trouble — this time in the still more dangerous way of writing
libelous
poems — so that his father was glad to send him to stay for
nearly a year (1714-15)
with
Louis de Caumartin,
marquis de
Saint-Ange,
in the country. Here he was still supposed to study law but
devoted himself in part to literary essays and in part to
storing up his immense treasure of gossiping
history.
Almost exactly at the time of the death of
Louis XIV
he returned to Paris, to fall once more into literary and
Templar society and to make the tragedy of Oedipe,
which he had already written, privately known. He was
introduced to the famous "court of Sceaux", the circle of the
beautiful and ambitious
duchesse du Maine.
It seems that Voltaire lent himself to the duchess' frantic
hatred of the regent,
Philippe II of Orléans,
and helped compose
lampoons
on him. In May
1716 he
was exiled, first to
Tulle,
then to
Sully,
later, having been allowed to return, he was suspected of
having been concerned in the composition of two violent libels.
Inveigled by a spy named Beauregard into a real or burlesque
confession he was sent to the
Bastille
on
May 16,
1717,
here he recast Oedipe, began the Henriade
and decided to change his name.
Ever after his
exit from the Bastille in April
1718 he
was known as Arouet de Voltaire, or simply
Voltaire, though legally he never abandoned his
patronymic.
The origin of the name has been much debated and attempts have
been made to show that it existed in the Daumart pedigree or
in some territorial designation. Some maintain that it was an
abbreviation of a childish nickname, "le petit volontaire".
The balance of opinion has, however, always inclined to the
hypothesis of an anagram on the name "Arouet le jeune" or "Arouet
l.j.", 'u' being changed to 'v' and 'j' to 'i' according to
the ordinary rules of the game.
A further "exile"
at
Châtenay
and elsewhere followed the imprisonment however, though
Voltaire was admitted to an audience by
the regent
and treated graciously, he was not trusted. Oedipe
was performed at the
Théâtre Français
on
November 18
and was well received, though a rivalry grew between parties
assisting its success. It had a run of forty-five nights and
brought the author not a little profit, with these gains
Voltaire seems to have begun his long series of successful
financial speculations.
In the spring of
the next year the production of Lagrange-Chancel's libels,
entitled the Philip piques, again brought suspicion
on Voltaire. He was informally exiled, and spent much time
with
Marshal Villars,
again increasing his store of "reminiscences". He returned to
Paris in the winter and his second play, Artemire,
was produced in February
1720.
It was a failure, and though it was recast with some success,
Voltaire never published it as a whole and used parts of it in
other work. He again spent much of his time with Villars,
listening to the marshal's stories and making harmless love to
the duchess.
In December
1721
his father died leaving him property, rather more than four
thousand livres a year, which was soon increased by a pension
of half the amount from
the regent.
In return for this, or in hopes of more, he offered himself as
a spy — or at any rate as a secret diplomatist — to Dubois,
but meeting his old enemy Beauregard in one of the minister's
rooms and making an offensive remark, he was waylaid by
Beauregard some time after in a less privileged place and
soundly beaten.
His visiting
espionage,
or secret diplomatic mission, began in the summer of
1722
and he set out for it in company with a certain Madame de
Rupelmonde, to whom he, as usual, made love, taught deism and
served as an amusing travelling companion. He stayed at
Cambrai
for some time, where European diplomatists were still in full
session, journeyed to
Brussels,
where he met and quarrelled with
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau,
went on to the Hague and then returned. The Henriade
had got on considerably during the journey and, according to
his lifelong habit, the poet, with the help of his friend
Thiériot and others, had been "working the oracle" of puffery.
During the late
autumn and winter of
1722-1723
he lived chiefly in Paris, taking a kind of lodging in the
town house of M. de Berniêres, a nobleman of
Rouen
and endeavouring to procure a "privilege" for his poem. In
this he was disappointed but he had the work printed at Rouen
nevertheless and spent the summer of
1723
revising it. In November he caught
smallpox
and was seriously ill, so that the book was not given to the
world till the spring of
1724 (and
then of course, as it had no privilege, appeared privately).
Almost at the same time, on the
4th of March,
his third tragedy, Marianne, appeared and was well
received at first but underwent complete damnation before the
curtain fell.
The regent
had died shortly before, not to Voltaire's advantage; for he
had been a generous patron. Voltaire had made, however, a
useful friend in another grand seigneur, as
profligate and nearly as intelligent, the duke of
Richelieu,
and with him he passed
1724
and the next year chiefly recasting the now successful
Marianne, but also writing the comedy of L'Indiscret
and courting the queen.
Exile to
England
The end of
1725
brought a disastrous close to this period of his life. He was
insulted by the
chevalier de Rohan,
replied with his usual sharpness of tongue, and shortly
afterwards, when dining with the duke of Sully, was called out
and beaten by the chevalier's hirelings, while Rohan watched.
Nearly three
months after the incident, he challenged Rohan, who accepted
the challenge, but on the morning appointed for the duel
Voltaire was arrested and sent for the second time to the
Bastille. He was kept in confinement a fortnight, and was then
packed off to
England
in accordance with his own request.
Soon after his
arrival,
George I
died and
George II
succeeded. The new king was not fond of poetry, but
Queen Caroline
was, and international jealousy was pleased at the thought of
welcoming a distinguished exile from French illiberality.
While in England
Voltaire was attracted to the philosophy of
John Locke
and ideas of Sir
Isaac Newton.
He studied England's
constitutional monarchy,
its
religious tolerance,
its philosophical
rationalism
and most importantly the "natural sciences". Voltaire also
greatly admired English
religious toleration
and
freedom of speech,
and saw these as necessary prerequisites for social and
political progress. He saw England as a useful model for what
he considered to be a backward
France.
Horace Walpole,
George Bubb Dodington,
Bolingbroke,
William Congreve,
the Duchess of Marlborough,
and
Alexander Pope
were among his English friends. He made acquaintance with, and
at least tried to appreciate, the work of
William Shakespeare.
He was much struck by English manners and by English
toleration for personal free thought and eccentricity, and
gained some thousands of pounds from an authorized English
edition of the Henriade, dedicated to the queen. But
he visited Paris now and then without permission, and his mind
was always set thereon. He gained full licence to return in
the spring of
1729,
now as one of the foremost literary men in Europe, with views
on all les grands sujets, and with a solid stock of
money.
Return to
Paris
He was full of
literary projects, and immediately after his return is said to
have increased his fortune immensely by a lucky lottery
speculation. The Henriade was at last licensed in
France; Brutus, a play which he had printed in
England, was accepted for performance, but kept back for a
time by the author; and he began the celebrated poem of the
Pucelle, the amusement and the torment of great part
of his life. But he had great difficulties with two of his
chief works which were ready to appear, Charles XII
and the Lettres sur les Anglais. With both he took
all imaginable pains to avoid offending the
censorship.
At the end of
1730
Brutus was actually staged. In the spring of the next
year, Voltaire went to
Rouen
to get Charles XII surreptitiously printed. In
1732
two more
tragedies
appeared with great success: Eriphile and Zaire.
In the following winter the death of the comtesse de Fontaine-Martel,
whose guest and supposed lover he had been, turned him out of
a comfortable abode. He then took lodgings with an agent of
his, one Demoulin, in an out-of-the-way part of Paris, and was,
for some time at least, as much occupied with contracts,
speculation and all sorts of means of gaining money as with
literature.
In the middle of
this period, in
1733,
two important books, the
Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais
and the Temple du gout appeared. Both were likely to
make bad blood, for the latter was, under the mask of easy
verse, a
satire
on contemporary French literature, especially on
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau,
and the former was, in the guise of a criticism or rather
panegyric of English ways, an attack on everything established
in the church and state of France. It was published with
certain "remarks" on
Blaise Pascal,
more offensive to orthodoxy than itself, and no mercy was
shown to it. The book was condemned (June
10,
1734),
the copies seized and
burned,
a warrant issued against the author, and his dwelling searched.
He himself was safe in the independent duchy of
Lorraine
with
Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet,
with whom he began to be intimate in
1733;
he had now taken up his abode with her at the château of
Cirey.
Cirey
If the English
visit may be regarded as having finished Voltaire's education,
the Cirey residence was the first stage of his literary
manhood. He had written important and characteristic work
before, but had not decided a direction. He now obtained a
settled home for many years and, taught by his numerous
brushes with the authorities, he began his future habit of
keeping out of personal harm's way, and of at once denying any
awkward responsibility, which made him for nearly half a
century at once the leader of European heretics in regard to
all established ideas. It was not till the summer of
1734
that Cirey, a half-dismantled country house on the borders of
Champagne, France
and Lorraine, was fitted up with Voltaire's money and became
the headquarters of himself, of his hostess, and now and then
of her accommodating husband.
Emilie's temper
was violent, and after a time she sought lovers who were not
so much des cérébraux as Voltaire. Nevertheless, it
provided him with a safe and comfortable retreat, and with
every opportunity for literary work. In March
1735
the hat was formally taken off him, and he was at liberty to
return to Paris, a liberty of which he availed himself
sparingly. At Cirey he wrote indefatigably and did not neglect
business. The principal literary results of his early years
here were the Discours en vers sur l'Homme, the play
of Aizire and L'Enfant prodigue (1736),
and a long treatise on the Newtonian system which he and
Madame du Chatelet wrote together.
In the very first
days at Cirey he had written a pamphlet with the title of
Treatise on Metaphysics. In March
1736 he
received his first letter from
Frederick II of Prussia,
then crown prince. He was soon again in trouble, this time for
the poem, Le Mondain, and he at once crossed the
frontier and made for Brussels. He spent about three months in
the
Low Countries,
but in March
1737
returned to Cirey and continued writing, making experiments in
physics
(he had at this time a large laboratory), and busying himself
with
iron-founding,
the chief industry of the district.
The best-known
accounts of Cirey life, those of Madame de Grafigny, date from
the winter of
1738-39;
they are very amusing, depicting the frequent quarrels between
Madame du Chatelet and Voltaire, his intense suffering under
criticism, his constant dread of the surreptitious publication
of the Pucelle (which nevertheless he could not keep
his hands from writing or his tongue from reciting to his
visitors), and so forth.
In April
1739 a
journey was made to Brussels, to Paris, and then again to
Brussels, which was the headquarters for a considerable time,
owing to some law affairs, of the Du Chatelets. Frederick, now
king of Prussia, made not a few efforts to get Voltaire away
from Madame du Chatelet, but unsuccessfully, and the king
earned the lady's cordial hatred by persistently refusing or
omitting to invite her.
At last, in
September
1740,
master and pupil met for the first time at
Cleves,
an interview followed three months later by a longer visit.
Brussels was again the headquarters in
1741,
by which time Voltaire had finished two of his best plays,
Mérope and Mahomet.
Mahomet
was first performed at
Lille
in that year; it did not appear in Paris till August next year,
and Mérope not till
1743.
This last was, and deserved to be, the most successful of its
author's whole theatre. It was in this same year that he
received the singular diplomatic mission to Frederick which
nobody seems to have taken seriously, and after his return the
oscillation between Brussels, Cirey and Paris was resumed.
During these years
much of the Essai sur les moeurs and the Siècle
de Louis XIV was composed. He also returned, not too well
advisedly, to the business of courtiership, which he had given
up since the death of the regent. He was much employed, owing
to Richelieu's influence, in the fetes of the
dauphin's
marriage, and was rewarded through the influence of
Madame de Pompadour
on New Year's Day
1745 by
the appointment to the post of historiographer-royal,
temporarily achieving a secure social and financial position.
In the same year
he wrote a poem on Fontenoy, he received medals from
the pope
and dedicated Mahomet to him, and he wrote court
divertissements and other things to admiration. But he was not
a thoroughly skilful courtier, and one of the best known of
Voltairians is the contempt or at least silence with which
Louis XV
received the maladroit and almost insolent inquiry
Trajan
est-il content? addressed in
his hearing to Richelieu at the close of a piece in which the
emperor had appeared with a transparent reference to the king.
All this
assentation had at least one effect. He, who had been for
years admittedly the first writer in France, was at last
elected to the
Académie française
in the spring of
1746.
Then the tide
began to turn. His favour at court had naturally exasperated
his enemies; it had not secured him any real friends, and even
a gentlemanship of the chamber was no solid benefit, except
from the money point of view. He did not indeed hold it very
long, but was permitted to sell it for a large sum, retaining
the rank and privileges. He had various proofs of the
instability of his hold on the king during
1747
and in
1748.
He once lay in hiding for two months with the duchesse du
Maine at
Sceaux,
where were produced the comedietta of La Prude and
the Tragedie de
Rome
sauvée, and afterwards for a
time lived chiefly at
Lunéville;
here Madame du Chatelet had established herself at the court
of King
Stanislaus I of Poland,
and carried on a liaison with the soldier-poet,
Jean François de Saint-Lambert,
an officer in the king's guard. In September
1749
she died after the birth of a child.
Madame du
Chatelet's death is another turning-point in Voltaire's life.
He was deeply disturbed for a time, and considered settling
down in Paris. He went on writing satires like Zadig,
and engaged in a literary rivalry with
Crébillon
père,
a rival set up against him by Madame de Pompadour.
Frederick the
Great
In
1751,
Voltaire accepted
Frederick of Prussia's
invitations and moved to Berlin.
At first the king
behaved altogether like a king to his guest. He pressed him to
remain; he gave him (the words are Voltaire's own) one of his
orders, twenty thousand francs a year, and four thousand
additional for his niece, Madame Jenis, in case she would come
and keep house for her uncle. Voltaire insisted for the
consent of his own king, which was given without delay. But
Frenchmen regarded Voltaire as something of a deserter; and it
was not long before he bitterly repented his desertion, though
his residence in
Prussia
lasted nearly three years. It was quite impossible that
Voltaire and Frederick should get on together for long.
Voltaire was not humble enough to be a mere butt, as many of
Frederick's led poets were; he was not enough of a gentleman
to hold his own place with dignity and discretion; he was
constantly jealous both of his equals in age and reputation,
such as
Maupertuis,
and of his juniors and inferiors, such as Baculard D'Arnaud.
He was restless, and in a way
Bohemian.
Frederick, though his love of teasing for teasing's sake has
been exaggerated by Macaulay, was a martinet of the first
water, had a sharp though one-sided idea of justice, and had
not the slightest intention of allowing Voltaire to insult or
to tyrannize over his other guests and servants.
Voltaire had not
been in the country six months before he engaged in a
discreditable piece of financial gambling with Hirsch, the
Dresden Jew. He was accused of forgery -- of altering a paper
signed by Hirsch after he had signed it. The king's disgust at
this affair (which came to an open scandal before the
tribunals) was so great that he was on the point of ordering
Voltaire out of Prussia, and Darget the secretary had trouble
resolving the matter (February 1751). However, he succeeded in
finishing and printing the Siècle de Louis XIV, while
the Dictionnaire philosophique is said to have been
devised and begun at
Potsdam.
In the early
autumn of 1751 one of the king's parasites, and a man of much
more talent than is generally allowed, horrified Voltaire by
telling him that Frederick had in conversation applied to him
(Voltaire) a proverb about "sucking the orange and flinging
away its skin", and about the same time the dispute with
Pierre de Maupertuis,
which had more than anything else to do with his exclusion
from Prussia, came to a head. Maupertuis got into a dispute
with one Konig. The king took his president's part; Voltaire
took Konig's. But Maupertuis must needs write his Letters, and
thereupon (1752)
appeared one of Voltaire's most famous, though perhaps not one
of his most read works, the Histoire du docteur Akakia et
du natif de Saint-Malo. Even Voltaire did not venture to
publish this lampoon on a great official of a prince so touchy
as the king of Prussia without some permission, and if all
tales are true, he obtained this by another piece of something
like forgery—getting the king to endorse a totally different
pamphlet on its last leaf, and affixing that last leaf to
Akakia. Of this Frederick was not aware; but he did get
some wind of the diatribe itself, sent for the author, heard
it read to his own great amusement, and either actually burned
the manuscript or believed that it was burnt. In a few days
printed copies appeared.
Frederick did not like
disobedience, but he still less liked being made a fool of,
and he put Voltaire under arrest. But again the affair blew
over, the king believing that the edition of Akakia
confiscated in Prussia was the only one. Alas! Voltaire had
sent copies away; others had been printed abroad; and the
thing was irrecoverable. It could not be proved that he had
ordered the printing, and all Frederick could do was to have
the pamphlet burnt by the hangman. Things were now drawing to
a crisis.
One day Voltaire
sent his orders back; the next Frederick returned them, but
Voltaire had quite made up his mind to fly. A kind of
reconciliation occurred in March, and after some days of good-fellowship
Voltaire at last obtained the long-sought leave of absence and
left Potsdam on the 26th of the month (1753).
It was nearly three months afterwards that the famous,
ludicrous and brutal arrest was made at
Frankfurt,
on the persons of himself and his niece, who had met him
meanwhile.
There was some
faint excuse for Frederick's wrath. In the first place, the
poet chose to linger at
Leipzig.
In the second place, in direct disregard of a promise given to
Frederick, a supplement to Akakia appeared, more
offensive than the main text. From Leipzig, after a month's
stay, Voltaire moved to
Gotha.
Once more, on the
25th of May,
he moved on to Frankfurt. Frankfurt, nominally a free city,
but with a Prussian resident who did very much what he pleased,
was not like Gotha and Leipzig. An excuse was provided in the
fact that the poet had a copy of some unpublished poems of
Frederick's, and as soon as Voltaire arrived hands were laid
on him, at first with courtesy enough. The resident, Freytag,
was not a very wise person (though he probably did not, as
Voltaire would have it, spell "poésie" (poetry) "poéshie");
constant references to Frederick were necessary; and the
affair was prolonged so that Madame Denis had time to join her
uncle. At last Voltaire tried to steal away. He was followed,
arrested, his niece seized separately, and sent to join him in
custody; and the two, with the secretary Collini, were kept
close prisoners at an inn called the Goat.
This situation was
at last put an end to by the city authorities, who probably
felt that they were not playing a very creditable part.
Voltaire left Frankfurt on the 7th of July, travelled safely
to
Mainz,
and thence to
Mannheim,
Strassburg
and
Colmar.
The last-named place he reached (after a leisurely journey and
many honours at the little courts just mentioned) at the
beginning of October, and here he proposed to stay the winter,
finish his Annals of the Empire and look about him.
Voltaire's second
stage was now over. Even now, however, in his sixtieth year,
it required some more external pressure to induce him to make
himself independent. He had been, in the first blush of his
Frankfort disaster, refused, or at least not granted,
permission even to enter France proper. At Colmar he was not
safe, especially when in January
1754 a
pirated edition of the Essai sur les moeurs, written
long before, appeared. Permission to establish himself in
France was now absolutely refused. Nor did an extremely
offensive performance of Voltaire's—the solemn partaking of
the Eucharist at Colmar after due confession—at all mollify
his enemies. His exclusion from France, however, was chiefly
metaphorical, and really meant exclusion from Paris and its
neighbourhood. In the summer he went to
Plombières,
and after returning to Colmar for some time, journeyed in the
beginning of winter to
Lyons,
and thence in the middle of December to
Geneva.
Voltaire had no
plans to remain in the city, and immediately bought a country
house just outside the gates, which he named Les Délices.
He was here practically at the meeting-point of four distinct
jurisdictions—Geneva, the canton
Vaud,
Sardinia,
and
France,
while other cantons were within easy reach; and he bought
other houses dotted about these territories, so as never to be
without a refuge close at hand in case of sudden storms. At
Les Délices
he set up a considerable establishment, which his great wealth
made him able easily to afford. He kept open house for
visitors; he had printers close at hand in
Geneva;
he fitted up a private theatre in which he could enjoy what
was perhaps the greatest pleasure of his whole life—acting in
a play of his own, stage-managed by himself. His residence at
Geneva brought him into correspondence (at first quite
amicable) with the most famous of her citizens,
Rousseau.
His Orphelin de Chine, performed at Paris in
1755,
was very well received; the notorious La Pucelle
appeared in the same year. The earthquake at
Lisbon,
which appalled other people, gave Voltaire an excellent
opportunity for ridiculing the beliefs of the orthodox, first
in verse (1756)
and later in the unsurpassable tale of
Candide
(1759).
All was, however,
not yet quite smooth with him. Geneva had a law expressly
forbidding theatrical performances in any circumstances
whatever. Voltaire had infringed this law already as far as
private performances went, and he had thought of building a
regular theatre, not indeed at Geneva but at
Lausanne.
In July
1755 a
very polite and, as far as Voltaire was concerned, indirect
resolution of the Consistory declared that in consequence of
these proceedings of the Sieur de Voltaire the pastors should
notify their flocks to abstain, and that the chief syndic
should be informed of the Consistory's perfect confidence that
the edicts would be carried out. Voltaire obeyed this hint as
far as Les Délices was concerned, and consoled himself by
having the performances in his Lausanne house. But he never
was the man to take opposition to his wishes either quietly or
without retaliation. He undoubtedly instigated
d'Alembert
to include a censure of the prohibition in his
Encyclopédie
article on "Geneva," a proceeding which provoked Rousseau's
celebrated Lettre à D'Alembert sur les spectacles. As
for himself, he looked about for a place where he could
combine the social liberty of France with the political
liberty of Geneva, and he found one.
Ferney
At the end of
1758 he
bought the considerable property of
Ferney,
on the shore of the lake, about four miles from Geneva, and on
French soil. At Les Délices (which he sold in
1765)
he had become a householder on no small scale; at Ferney
(which he increased by other purchases and leases) he became a
complete country gentleman, and was henceforward known to all
Europe as squire of Ferney. Many of the most celebrated men of
Europe visited him there, and large parts of his usual
biographies are composed of extracts from their accounts of
Ferney. His new occupations by no means quenched his literary
activity - he reserved much time for work and for his immense
correspondence, which had for a long time once more included
Frederick, the two getting on very well when they were not in
contact.
Above all, he now
being comparatively secure in position, engaged much more
strongly in public controversies, and resorted less to his old
labyrinthine tricks of disavowal, garbled publication and
private libel. The suppression of the Encyclopédie, to which
he had been a considerable contributor, and whose conductors
were his intimate friends, drew from him a shower of lampoons
directed now at l'infâme. These were directed at
literary victims such as
Lefranc de Pompignan
or Palissot. Further lampoons were directed at
Fréron,
an excellent critic and a dangerous writer, who had attacked
Voltaire from the conservative side, and at whom the patriarch
of Ferney, as he now began to be called, levelled in return
the very inferior farce-lampoon of L'Ecossaise, of
the first night of which Fréron himself did an admirably
humorous criticism.
How he built a
church and got into trouble in so doing at Ferney, how he put
"Deo erexit Voltaire" on it (1760-61)
and obtained a relic from the pope for his new building, how
he entertained a grand-niece of Corneille, and for her benefit
wrote his well-known "commentary" on that poet, are matters of
interest, indeed. Here, too, he began that series of
interferences on behalf of the oppressed and the ill-treated
which is an honour to his memory. Volumes and almost libraries
have been written on the Calas affair, and we can but refer
here to the only less famous cases of Sirven (very similar to
that of Calas, though no judicial murder was actually
committed), Espinasse (who had been sentenced to the galleys
for harbouring a Protestant minister), Lally (the son of the
unjustly treated but not blameless Irish-French commander in
India), D'Etalonde (the companion of La Barre) Montbailli and
others.
In
1768 he
entered into controversy with the bishop of the diocese; he
had differences with the superior landlord of part of his
estate, the president De Brosses; and he engaged in a long and
tedious return match with the
republic
of Geneva. But the general events of this Ferney life are
somewhat of that happy kind which are no events.
In this way
Voltaire, who had been an old man when he established himself
at Ferney (now
Ferney-Voltaire),
became a very old one almost without noticing it. The death of
Louis XV and the accession of
Louis XVI
excited even in his aged breast the hope of re-entering Paris,
but he did not at once receive any encouragement, despite the
reforming ministry of
Turgot.
A much more solid gain to his happiness was the adoption, or
practical adoption, in
1776 of
Reine Philiberte de Varicourt, a young girl of noble but poor
family, whom Voltaire rescued from the convent, installed in
his house as an adopted daughter, and married to the marquis
de Villette.
Voltaire returned
to a hero's welcome in Paris at age 83 in time to see his last
play, Irene, produced. The excitement of the trip was
too much for him and he died in Paris on
May 30,
1778.
Stories about his death in a state of terror and despair are
false. Because of his criticism of the church Voltaire was
denied burial in church ground. He was finally buried at an
abbey in Champagne. In
1791
his remains were moved to a resting place at
The Panthéon
in Paris.
His works
Vast and various as the
work of Voltaire is, its vastness and variety are of the
essence of its writer's peculiar quality. The divisions of it
have long been recognized, and may be treated regularly.
-
Theatre
- He wrote between fifty and sixty plays (including a few
unfinished ones). Ironically, despite Voltaire's comic
talent, he wrote only one good comedy, Nanine, but
many good tragedies - two of them, Zaire and
Mérope, are ranked among the ten or twelve best plays
of the whole French classical school.
- Ecossaise
- Eriphile
(1732)
- Mahomet
- Mérope
- Nanine
- Zaire
(1732)
-
Poetry
- As regards his poems proper, of which there are two long
ones, the Henriade, and the Pucelle,
besides smaller pieces, of which a bare catalogue fills
fourteen royal octavo columns, their value is very unequal.
The Henriade has by wide consent been relegated to
the position of a school reading book. Constructed and
written in almost slavish imitation of
Virgil,
employing for medium a very unsuitable vehicle—the
Alexandrine couplet (as reformed and rendered monotonous for
dramatic purposes)—and animated neither by enthusiasm for
the subject nor by real understanding thereof, it could not
but be an unsatisfactory performance.
The Pucelle,
if morally inferior, is from a literary point of view of far
more value, it is desultory to a degree; it is a base libel on
religion and history; it differs from its model
Lodovico Ariosto
in being, not, as Ariosto is, a mixture of romance and
burlesque,
but a sometimes tedious tissue of burlesque pure and simple.
Nevertheless, with all the Pucelle 's faults, it is
amusing. The minor poems are as much above the Pucelle
as the Pucelle is above the Henriade.
- Prose romances
or tales - These productions—incomparably the most
remarkable and most absolutely good fruit of his genius—were
usually composed as
pamphlets,
with a purpose of polemic in religion, politics, or what
not. Thus Candide attacks religious and
philosophical optimism, L'Homme aux quarante ecus
certain social and political ways of the time, Zadig
and others the received forms of moral and metaphysical
orthodoxy, while some are mere lampoons on the
Bible,
the unfailing source of Voltaire's wit. But (as always
happens in the case of literary work where the form exactly
suits the author's genius) the purpose in all the best of
them disappears almost entirely.
It is in these
works more than in any others that the peculiar quality of
Voltaire—ironic style without exaggeration—appears. If one
especial peculiarity can be singled out, it is the extreme
restraint and simplicity of the verbal treatment. Voltaire
never dwells too long on this point, stays to laugh at what he
has said, elucidates or comments on his own jokes, guffaws
over them or exaggerates their form. The famous "pour
encourager les autres" (that the shooting of Byng did
"encourage the others" very much is not to the point) is a
typical example, and indeed the whole of Candide
shows the style at its perfection. Voltaire has, in common
with
Jonathan Swift,
the distinction of paving the way for
science fiction's
philosophical irony. See especially
Micromegas.
- Historical -
This division of Voltaire's work is the bulkiest of all
except his correspondence, and some parts of it are or have
been among the most read, but it is far from being even
among the best. The small treatises on
Charles XII
and
Peter the Great
are indeed models of clear narrative and ingenious if
somewhat superficial grasp and arrangement. The so-called
Siècle de
Louis XIV of France
and Siecle de
Louis XV.
(the latter inferior to the former but still valuable)
contain a great miscellany of interesting matter, treated by
a man of great acuteness and unsurpassed power of writing,
who had also had access to much important private
information. But even in these books defects are present,
which appear much more strongly in the singular olla
podrida entitled Essai sur les moeurs, in the
Annales de Vempire and in the minor historical
works.
- Physics - His work in
physics concerns us less than any other here; it is,
however, not inconsiderable in bulk, and is said by experts
to give proof of aptitude.
- Philosophy - To his
own age Voltaire was pre-eminently a poet and a philosopher;
the unkindness of succeeding ages has sometimes questioned
whether he had any title to either name, and especially to
the latter. His largest philosophical work, at least so
called, is the curious medley entitled Dictionnaire
philosophique, which is compounded of the articles
contributed by him to the great Encyclopédie and of several
minor pieces. No one of Voltaire's works shows his
anti-religious or at least anti-ecclesiastical animus more
strongly. The various title-words of the several articles
are often the merest stalking horses, under cover of which
to shoot at the Bible or the church, the target being now
and then shifted to the political institutions of the
writer's country. his personal foes, etc., and the whole
being largely seasoned with that acute, rather superficial,
common-sense, but also commonplace, ethical and social
criticism which the 18th century called philosophy. The book
ranks perhaps second only to the novels as showing the
character, literary and personal, of Voltaire; and despite
its form it is nearly as readable.
- Miscellaneous -
In general criticism and miscellaneous writing Voltaire is
not inferior to himself in any of his other functions.
Almost all his more substantive works, whether in verse or
prose, are preceded by prefaces of one sort or another,
which are models of his own light pungent causerie; and in a
vast variety of nondescript pamphlets and writings he shows
himself a perfect journalist. In literary criticism pure and
simple his principle work is the Commentaire sur Corneille,
though he wrote a good deal more of the same kind—sometimes
(as in his Life and notices of
Molière)
independently sometimes as part of his Siécles. Nowhere,
perhaps, except when he is dealing with religion, are
Voltaire's defects felt more than here. He was quite
unacquainted with the history of his own language and
literature, and more here than anywhere else he showed the
extraordinarily limited and conventional spirit which
accompanied the revolt of the French 18th century against
limits and conventions in theological, ethical and political
matters.
- Correspondence -
There remains only the huge division of his correspondence,
which is constantly being augmented by fresh discoveries,
and which, according to Georges Bengesco, has never been
fully or correctly printed, even in some of the parts
longest known. In this great mass Voltaire's personality is
of course best shown, and perhaps his literary qualities not
worst. His immense energy and versatility, his adroit and
unhesitating flattery when he chose to flatter, his ruthless
sarcasm when he chose to be sarcastic, his rather
unscrupulous business faculty, his more than rather
unscrupulous resolve to double and twist in any fashion so
as to escape his enemies—all these things appear throughout
the whole mass of letters.
Voltaire's works,
and especially his private letters, constantly contain the
word "l'infame" and the expression (in full or abbreviated)
"ecrasez l'infame." This has been misunderstood in many
ways—the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose that
Voltaire meant
Christ
by this obbrobrious expression. No careful and competent
student of his works has ever failed to correct this gross
misapprehension. "L'infame" is not
God; it
is not Christ; it is not
Christianity;
it is not even
Catholicism.
Its briefest equivalent may be given as "persecuting and
privileged orthodoxy" in general, and, more particularly, it
is the particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of
which he had felt the effects in his own exiles and the
confiscations of his books, and of which he saw the still
worse effects in the hideous sufferings of Calas and La Barre.
His legacy
Most judgments of
Voltaire have been unduly coloured by sympathy with or dislike
of what may be briefly called his polemical side. When
sympathy and dislike are discarded or allowed for, he remains
one of the most astonishing, if not exactly one of the most
admirable, figures of letters. That he never, as Carlyle
complains, gave utterance to one great thought is strictly
true. That his characteristic is for the most part an almost
superhuman cleverness rather than positive genius is also
true. But that he was merely a mocker, which Carlyle and
others have also said, is not strictly true or fair. In
politics proper he seems indeed to have had few or no
constructive ideas, and to have been entirely ignorant or
quite reckless of the fact that his attacks were destroying a
state of things for which as a whole he neither had nor
apparently wished to have any substitute. In religion he
protested stoutly, and no doubt sincerely, that his own
attitude was not purely negative; but here also he seems to
have failed altogether to distinguish between pruning and
cutting down. Both here and elsewhere his great fault was an
inveterate superficiality. But this superficiality was
accompanied by such wonderful acuteness within a certain
range, by such an absolutely unsurpassed literary aptitude
band sense of style in all the lighter and some of the graver
modes of literature, by such untiring energy and versatility
in enterprise, that he has no parallel among ready writers
anywhere. Not the most elaborate work of Voltaire is of much
value for matter; but not the very slightest work of Voltaire
is devoid of value in form. In literary craftsmanship, at once
versatile and accomplished, he has no superior and scarcely a
rival.
Voltaire 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 force only useful as a counterbalance since its
"religious tax", or the
tithe,
helped to cement a powerbase against the monarchy.
Voltaire
distrusted
democracy,
which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. To
Voltaire only an enlightened
monarch,
advised by
philosophers
like himself, could bring about change as it was in the king's
rational interest to improve the power and wealth of
France
in the world. Voltaire is quoted as saying that he "would
rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of (his own) species".
Voltaire essentially believed
monarchy
to be the key to progress and change.
He is best known
in this day and age for his novel,
Candide
(ou de l'Optimisme), (1759)
which satirizes the philosophy of
Gottfried Leibniz.
Candide was subject to censorship and Voltaire did
not openly claim it as his own work
[1]
(http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/Candide/Candide.letter.html).
Voltaire is also
known for many memorable aphorisms, like Si Dieu
n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ("If God did not
exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a
verse epistle from
1768,
addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work,
The Three Impostors.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau,
not to be confused with the philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
sent a copy of his "Ode to Posterity" to Voltaire. Voltaire
read it through and said, "I do not think this poem will reach
its destination."
The town of
Ferney
(France)
where he lived his last 20 years of life, is now named
Ferney-Voltaire. His Château is now a museum (L'Auberge
de l'Europe).
|