VOLTAIRE
| Introduction Birth and Education Youthful Follies and England |
The Middle Years The End Philosophy and Religion |
|
INTRODUCTION
For
many people Voltaire is unknown except as the author of his short novel Candide.
Yet he was one of the most prolific writers of his time, determined to improve
the conditions under which most people lived. Nothing was immune from the
sting of his pen, but among his most frequent targets were war and religion,
especially that of the Roman Catholic Church. His works dominated all the
major genres of literature in his attempt to insure liberty and freedom by
the use of reason, and almost all of his thinking was distilled into the few
short pages of Candide.
BIRTH
AND EDUCATION
When François Marie Arouet (later Voltaire) was baptized on November
22, 1694, Louis XIV was on the throne. His birth was recorded as just the
day before, and named as his father was the lawyer François Arouet.
He was clearly not a newborn; he seemed to be about nine months old. Yet his
birth was attested by his godfather, the Abbé François de Castegnère
de Chàteaneuf, so no questions were asked. Why the deception? All his
life, Voltaire believed he was the bastard son of one of his father's clients
born on Feb. 20, 1694, and he felt a kinship with his bastard hero Candide.
His "father" became very wealthy and came into contact with the leading cultural figures of the day. Rather delicate as a baby, the boy grew up in this milieu and his godfather introduced him to poetry. Gaining some fame as a boy prodigy, he was sent in 1704 to the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, the "best school in France". There he met many students from foreign countries and cultures. Although the boys could bring their own servants, life at school was austere. The daily schedule consisted of: 5 a.m. prayers and study; 7:30 lessons; 10:00 Mass then lunch; 2 p.m. lessons, 6 p.m. supper followed by recreation; then more study, prayers and Bible study until lights out at 9 p.m. There were no sports, and corporal punishment was frequent. A school rule forbade heat in the buildings before ice formed in the holy water, and the delicate boy, suffering from the cold, placed some ice in the basin to fool the school leaders. The boys were watched every minute of the day and night, a cleric even slept in their dormitory. This was the life he led for seven years. On the positive side, most of the faculty were true scholars, and the intelligent François was exposed to some of the best thinking of the day. He was the star of the school, winning awards for Latin discourse and Latin verse. He also learned Greek. From the student plays in which he participated, he developed a life-long love of the theatre.
YOUTHFUL FOLLIES
AND ENGLAND
After school Voltaire returned home. His father wanted him to go into the
law, offering to buy him a position as a barrister. But the stubborn teenager
refused; he wanted to be a poet. Finally he was persuaded to become the personal
secretary of the French ambassador to The Hague. There he had an affair and
was sent home to find he had been sentenced to the Bastille and disinherited.
The sentence to the Bastille was commuted to exile to the West Indies and,
in the end, he escaped this by agreeing to take a legal position outside of
Paris. However, in 1717, he wrote some satirical verses against the Regent.
Although he used a pseudonym, everyone knew he was the author, and he did
land in the Bastille, taking with him the works of Homer. At first he treated
imprisonment as a joke. For the well-to-do, although restricted, it was not
too bad. He later claimed that while his health never recovered, he learned
a lot about himself while there and started to grow up. Released after eleven
months, he was at first required to live outside of Paris under a type of
house arrest. Then, after his return to Paris, he contracted smallpox and
almost died. He decided to change his name to Arouet de Voltaire and later
simply Voltaire. There are many theories about how he arrived at this name
but the real derivation is unknown. No longer bearing the name of his "father",
he spent the rest of his life with the single name Voltaire.
An incident at the Opéra involving a taunt about his new name escalated to such a degree that he was again sent to the Bastille.
When he was released, he left for England (1726-8) where he spent three years, quickly becoming fluent in English. (Years later Boswell asked if he still spoke English, and he replied: "No, to speak English one must place the tongue between the teeth, and I have lost my teeth".) After the corruption and restrictive society of France, the British government structure and the freedom of the people were a revelation. People dared to think! He became friends with many of the literary figures of the day such as John Gay (Beggar's Opera - 1728) and Jonathan Swift (Robinson Crusoe - 1726), and with the cream of British society and intellectual life which including Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (ancestress of Winston Churchill). He left England determined to work against injustice and intolerance in France.
THE
MIDDLE YEARS
On Voltaire's return to Paris he joined a syndicate to bet on the lottery,
buying large blocks of tickets. Tickets came in various price ranges and they
realized that, by buying a huge number of very cheap tickets, they could greatly
increase their chance of winning. They did well, and Voltaire became wealthy.
Soon other dealings allowed him to devote his all of his time to writing and
still to live very well.
An event which had a tremendous influence on him was the treatment of the France's greatest actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur, with whom he had a brief affair. When she died, she was denied burial in sacred ground because of her profession which made her excommunicate. (France was the only country at time with such a blanket restriction, and there was no such ban on the rich and dissolute members of society who attended her performances.) She was taken outside the city and buried in a pauper's grave, still better than the usual disposal as trash. Shortly afterward a famous English actress was buried in Westminster Abbey, and Voltaire was incensed at the difference. The contrast in treatment was portrayed in Candide with the ceremonial burial of the Archbishop but the disposal of the Jew in the sewer. The incident haunted Voltaire all his life and affected his preparations for his own end. The ban was not lifted for another 100 years.
After
numerous affairs, he entered a long lasting relationship with Emilie du
Châtelet, the leading female scientist and mathematician of her
day. Her translation of Newton's Principia mathematica from Latin to
French is still one of the leading French versions. He had met her when she
was still a precocious child being tutored at home rather than being sent
to a convent school, the usual education for a girl at the time. She could
divide a nine-digit number by another nine-digit number in her head and was
taught subjects usually reserved for boys. However, when it came to marriage,
tradition prevailed. At nineteen her father arranged a marriage to an high-ranking,
although relatively poor, nobleman and army officer, the Marquis du Châtelet
who owned a near-ruined chateau at Cirey-sur-Blaise. (His rank entitled his
wife to the rare privilege of being able to sit the presence of the Queen
– on a low stool!) She dutifully bore him two children then started to
follow her own interests, fun and gambling. In 1733, she met Voltaire once
more and the rest, as they say, is history. They could talk together on serious
subjects as well has having fun, and they moved to her husband's chateau
at Cirey which they fixed up with Voltaire's money. (Her husband was
conveniently away on army duty.) They continued together until her death in
1749, the local priest turning a blind eye. Determined to continue working,
they established a daily timetable with certain hours for work, others for
discussion and some for recreation. They met for coffee in the morning but
ate lunch separately and alone. There were many guests of all sorts, including
many scientists; Cirey became a center of research, filled with scientific
instruments even in the room used for dining. After supper together with the
guests, there were frequently entertainments with plays, puppet shows and
Voltaire's conversation. After the guests retired, the hosts went back to
work for half the night. Their interests were varied but the chief was Newtonian
physics. They also made a study of the nature of fire and concluded that it
had weight. When metal was heated in fire it gained weight which, they concluded,
must have been provided by the fire. (Lavoisier had not yet discovered oxygen
which, as we know, forms the heavier metallic oxide on heating.)
Cirey established the pattern of Voltaire's later life, living away from the main centers and communicating by letter with acquaintances all over Europe. As an adult, he spent no more than six years total in Paris. The Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia (later Frederick II or Frederick the Great) heard of Voltaire and began a life-long correspondence with him. Among other things, Voltaire helped Frederick with his French and edited his attempts at poetry. Frederick was a Francophile and lover of science and philosophy. They met for the first time in 1740 near Cleves, then a duchy, now in the German district of Westphalia. Voltaire visited him there where Frederick was sick in bed with a high fever. However, he insisted on rising to have supper with his guest.
For years Frederick tried to lure Voltaire to his court in Berlin. After Voltaire tried several times to be elected to the Académie Française and failed, he was so disappointed that he finally yielded to Frederick's urging and went to Berlin. There he was fêted and later was made a chamberlain of the royal household. Frederick now had a court to rival Versailles. When Voltaire decided to return to Paris, he sent Frederick a letter of resignation. It was refused at first and he thought of escaping in disguise. Frederick finally relented, but Paris was not ready to welcome its now infamous son, and he spent some time in Frankfurt and elsewhere before finally receiving permission to return. (Later he was elected to the Académie.)
After the death of Emilie, he lived with his niece, Marie-Louise Denis, a relationship which was to last until her death. She was officially his nurse-companion but is spoken of as his "wife" and she conceived his child which she miscarried. They spent most of their time in Switzerland near Lake Geneva. As a Catholics, even a lapsed one, he could not buy property in Calvinist Geneva, but he could rent. Through a complicated arrangement they were able to obtain property, and they proceeded to make extensive additions to the garden. However, he ran into trouble because he and his friends liked to produce amateur theatricals, and Genevans thought these immoral. (They also objected to the luxury in which he lived and the increasingly vocal exposition of his beliefs. The Calvanists were just as intolerant as the Catholics.) While he and his niece lived abstemiously and ate simply, their guests lived in luxury and were fed lavish meals.
Finally
they decided to move to French soil although avoiding Paris and still near
Geneva. They bought a huge old house at Ferney complete with a staff
of almost 35, including slaves and a shepherd, and horses and cattle. It had
a large garden, four towers with arrow-slits, a parish church, a gibbet and
the right to tax and judge tenants. (He refused to pay the stamp tax on the
deal.) It had all been neglected and appealed to Voltaire's desire to do good..
He also leased the adjacent property of Tourney; the two houses were three
miles apart and the whole complex offered several escape routes from France
to Switzerland should it prove necessary to flee. (His works were becoming
more and more controversial.)
As
at Cirey, Voltaire continued to tend his garden both physically and
metaphorically. Into his eighties, he personally worked on and supervised
the work of the estate. He was also concerned with improving the life of his
tenants. Becoming fascinated with Swiss watches, he set up a watch factory
using emigré watch makers from Geneva. He also started to raise silk
and produce silk stockings, setting up a model community for all the workers.
When a poor harvest created a wheat shortage, he invented a bread which was
partially made with potatoes. Voltaire said: "I have done only one
sensible thing in my life, to cultivate the ground. He who tills a field,
renders a better service to mankind than all the scribblers of Europe".
This is reflected in Candide.
Over one hundred years later the poet W.H. Auden was to write in "Voltaire at Ferney":
Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast,
A joiner touched his cap: and agent came to tell
Some of the trees he'd planted were progressing well.
...
...the fight
Against the false and the unfair
Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilize.
While at Ferney, news reached him of the earthquake at Lisbon (Nov. 1, 1755 - All Saints Day) and news of the Seven Years War was dire. (Voltaire invented a horse-drawn tank for the army but it was not adopted.) These two events eventually let to the writing of Candide.
THE
END
Toward
the end of his life Voltaire managed to be given permission to return to Paris.
One of the conditions he had to meet was to take communion after making his
confession to "prove" he was a Catholic. He faked an illness, pretended
he was dying and, after a fake confession, he was given the Last Rites. "Recovered",
he returned to Paris; it had been 25 years since he had last been in the French
capital. He was fêted and given all the honors he had been denied for
so long; while at the Opéra he was crowned with a laurel wreath. Benjamin
Franklin, who had supported his ideas for 45 years, was in Paris to sign the
treaty of French support and friendship for the colonists. He visited Voltaire
who called him the "inventor of electricity". (He had been one of
the first to install a lightening rod, the American's invention, when he was
living at Ferney.) Franklin, as Grand Master in Pennsylvania, was Voltaire's
sponsor when he became a Freemason.
One problem remained. As an ‘infidel", how could Voltaire be properly buried? He was still in disfavor with the crown, and he didn't want a recurrence of the circumstances surrounding the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur. Now too ill to travel, a plan was hatched to smuggle his body out of the Paris jurisdiction after he died and take it to Ferney. Mummification was not a great art at the time, but his brain was removed and placed in a jar, and his heart was also removed and taken to Ferney. The rest of his body was dressed and seated tied upright in a carriage to simulate life, and it started on the journey to Ferney. However, it soon became evident it could not make the entire journey. Outside Paris an arrangement was made with a local prior for him to be buried in the priory chapel. The Church reacted angrily, and it would not allow the Académie Française to hold the customary memorial service for a departed member. However, in Prussia, Frederick the Great gave orders for a Requiem Mass in Berlin's cathedral, and he personally delivered an eulogy at the Berlin Academy.
Voltaire's
heart was later returned to Paris and resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France. His library was sold to Catherine the Great of Russia and is still
in St. Petersburg. After the Revolution the French wanted a place to bury
its heroes similar to Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon was established in
the church of St. Genevieve. In 1791 Voltaire's body was exhumed and placed
there. On its final journey it passed the Bastille where he had been twice
imprisoned and the Tuilleries where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were awaiting
execution after their attempted escape from Paris. Among other Frenchmen honored
in the Pantheon are Rousseau, Marat, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Marie
and Pierre Curie, Louis Braille and Alexander Dumas, père. Voltaire's
tomb is in the crypt by his statue but, at the time of the 1814 Restoration,
his remains were removed and scattered.
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
Voltaire became the symbol of the Enlightenment,
and his works gave it a voice. However, while the majority of his writings
were on philosophy, he was not himself a great philosopher. He was a strong
advocate for the use of reason and common sense in all actions and thoughts.
He attacked the philosophers with whom he disagreed such as Leibnitz
and Pope and also introduced the English philosophers such as Locke and
Newton to the Continent.
He spent his life revolting against authority especially religious intolerance and oppressive government. He defended its victims and was later acclaimed as the first human-rights campaigner of the modern era. While he did not advocate a constitution on the English model, he thought an Enlightened Absolutism was the best form of government. Although he foresaw the French Revolution, he was not himself a revolutionary,
Although he spent his life attacking organized religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church, Voltaire was not an atheist or agnostic. He opposed Christianity all his life but not God; he did believe some sort of simple belief in God was necessary for humanity. He was a Deist who, because the order of the universe implies a creator, believed God created the world and keeps it running but does not interact with people. At one point he was attracted to Manicheism, and this is reflected in the character of Martin in Candide.
HIS
WORKS
One
famous quotation ascribed to Voltaire that he did not write is: "I
disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say
it". Tallentyre used the phrase to summarize Voltaire's attitude about
a cause célèbre of the time.
Because his works were so controversial he used about 175 pseudonyms during his career, and he found ways to circulate those which had previously been communicated secretly. Many to be smuggled out to publishers and were often published anonymously; he often denied authorship of what he wrote.
Above all, he wrote an astonishing number and variety of letters. Among his correspondents were Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Pope, Lessing, Richelieu, Madame Pompadour and the rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia and the leaders of most other European countries. They were mostly in French, but he also wrote in English, Italian, Latin, German and Spanish. He penned as many as 20,000 over his lifetime.
His public reputation was built on his plays, poems, and histories. These included a colossal Philosophy of History, an attempt to write a complete history of the world. While he was a contributor to the famous Encyclopedia, he felt the need for something simpler, more accessible. and less expensive, something like Samuel Johnson's two volume Dictionary of the English Language. This would make a wide variety of information available to a wide number of people. He wanted his readers to think for themselves, not just take things on faith. Soon, of course, this work was condemned as heresy.
Candide is one of his few works of fiction and is a lightly disguised diatribe against the foibles and abuses of his day.
Revised August,
2008
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