Voltaire: Philosopher, Satirist, and Champion of Reason

Voltaire was the greatest polemicist of the European Enlightenment — a man whose pen was the most dangerous weapon in the intellectual arsenal of his age, whose wit was sharp enough to draw blood from kings and cardinals, and whose sixty-year campaign against superstition, religious persecution, and political tyranny helped prepare the intellectual ground for the revolutions that transformed the modern world. He was a playwright, a poet, a historian, a philosopher, a satirist, a pamphleteer, and a correspondent of extraordinary productivity; he was also one of the most contentious, self-promoting, and relentlessly energetic human beings of any era. His name — the pen name he adopted early in his career — became synonymous with a specific quality of mind: skeptical, ironic, committed to reason and evidence, impatient with cant and cruelty, and never willing to accept an outrage in silence.

He was born François-Marie Arouet on November 21, 1694, in Paris, the son of a notary of the upper bourgeoisie. His father, François Arouet, wanted him to study law; his mother, Marie Marguerite Daumard, died when he was seven. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, one of the best schools in France, where he received a thorough grounding in Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and classical literature that would furnish his writing for the rest of his life. He also developed, at Louis-le-Grand, the social confidence and the skill at self-presentation that would make him welcome in the aristocratic salons of Paris — and the rebellious intelligence that would bring him repeatedly into conflict with those who governed them.

He began writing poetry and plays in his teens, and his wit attracted the attention of the libertine circle around the Temple in Paris — a group of aristocratic freethinkers, skeptics, and pleasure-seekers who provided him with his first major social world and his first serious exposure to ideas that challenged the orthodox theology of the Church. His father, alarmed by these associations, twice had him sent to the provinces; the second time, he was exiled to the château of Saint-Ange, near Caen, where he began work on his first important play, Oedipe.

His first imprisonment in the Bastille came in 1717, when he was twenty-two, for verses satirizing the Regent of France, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and the nobility. He spent eleven months in the Bastille, during which time he continued to write and adopted the pen name Voltaire — an anagram of Arouet le jeune with Latin and French letters rearranged, a typical act of wit and self-reinvention. He emerged from the Bastille with his reputation enhanced and his satirical impulses undiminished.

The Early Career: Playwright and Poet

The decades of the 1720s and 1730s established Voltaire as the leading literary figure of France, a position he held essentially unchallenged for fifty years. His plays — written in the classical French tradition, observing the unities of time, place, and action — were among the most successful of the century, performed at the Comédie-Française and at the courts of Europe. His epic poem La Henriade (1723), celebrating Henri IV of France as a model of religious tolerance and rational monarchy, was a major work that established him as a serious poet in the French classical tradition.

But the event that shaped his intellectual development most decisively was his exile to England. In 1726, following a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan — a member of the high aristocracy who had Voltaire beaten by servants and then used his social connections to have him imprisoned in the Bastille again — he was given the choice between further imprisonment and exile to England. He chose England, and he remained there for about two and a half years, from 1726 to 1729.