Voltaire

Voltaire was the most famous writer in eighteenth-century Europe and the emblem of the Enlightenment's campaign against religious persecution. Born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary, he was educated by Jesuits, refused to study law, and adopted the name Voltaire at twenty-four. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven months in 1717 for verses insulting the regent, and in 1726, after quarrelling with a nobleman who had him beaten by servants, was imprisoned again and then exiled to England. The two and a half years in England were decisive. He found a country with an elected parliament, religious toleration, respect for merchants and writers, and Newtonian science, and published the Letters Concerning the English Nation in 1733 comparing it favourably with France. The book was condemned and burned. He spent fifteen years at Cirey with Émilie du Châtelet, a mathematician who translated Newton's Principia and with whom he wrote on physics. He produced an enormous body of work — plays, epic poetry, the Philosophical Dictionary, a history of the age of Louis XIV, and around twenty thousand letters — and made a fortune from a flaw in a government lottery, which kept him independent. Candide, written in 1759 after the Lisbon earthquake, demolishes the argument that this is the best of all possible worlds and ends with the instruction to cultivate one's garden. From 1762 he campaigned for Jean Calas, a Protestant broken on the wheel on a false charge of murdering his son, and secured a posthumous exoneration. He settled at Ferney near the Swiss border for easy escape, and died in Paris in 1778.

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