Voltaire dominated the discourse of his era. In his writing, he left virtually no subject untouched. Voltaire wrote on subjects as distinct as metaphysics and politics, and he circulated nearly as many books of history as he did books of political theory. Common themes pervade his work: liberty, progress, and equality are discussed at length and in depth in many of Voltaire’s books and pamphlets. In short, Voltaire greatly influenced the direction of European thought in the 18th century. Although he died in 1778, he is often credited as being an architect of the Revolution of 1789 .

Voltaire believed above all in the efficacy of reason . He believed social progress could be achieved through reason and that no authority—religious or political or otherwise—should be immune to challenge by reason. He emphasized in his work the importance of tolerance, especially religious tolerance. In the Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire discussed the effects and benefits of religious tolerance.

Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer. In his lifetime he published numerous works, including books, plays, poems, and polemics. His most famous works included the fictitious Lettres philosophiques (1734) and the satirical novel Candide (1759). The former—a series of essays on English government and society—was a landmark in the history of thought. Today it is considered one of the great monuments of French literature . Voltaire’s Candide is similarly lauded.

“Voltaire” is the pen name under which French author-philosopher François-Marie Arouet published a number of books and pamphlets in the 18th century. He was a key figure in the European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment . Voltaire was quite controversial in his day, in no small part because of the critical nature of his work. His books and pamphlets contained scores of assaults on church authority and clerical power. They criticized French political institutions too, and many incorporated elaborate defenses of civil liberty . Voltaire’s ideas ultimately found expression in the French and American revolutions.

Voltaire , pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet , (born November 21, 1694, Paris , France—died May 30, 1778, Paris), one of the greatest of all French writers. Although only a few of his works are still read, he continues to be held in worldwide repute as a courageous crusader against tyranny , bigotry , and cruelty. Through its critical capacity, wit , and satire , Voltaire’s work vigorously propagates an ideal of progress to which people of all nations have remained responsive. His long life spanned the last years of classicism and the eve of the revolutionary era , and during this age of transition his works and activities influenced the direction taken by European civilization.

Heritage and youth

Voltaire’s background was middle class. According to his birth certificate he was born on November 21, 1694, but the hypothesis that his birth was kept secret cannot be dismissed, for he stated on several occasions that in fact it took place on February 20. He believed that he was the son of an officer named Rochebrune, who was also a songwriter. He had no love for either his putative father, François Arouet, a onetime notary who later became receiver in the Cour des Comptes (audit office), or his elder brother Armand. Almost nothing is known about his mother, of whom he hardly said anything. Having lost her when he was seven, he seems to have become an early rebel against family authority. He attached himself to his godfather, the abbé de Châteauneuf, a freethinker and an epicurean who presented the boy to the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos when she was in her 84th year. It is doubtless that he owed his positive outlook and his sense of reality to his bourgeois origins.

He attended the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he learned to love literature, the theatre, and social life. While he appreciated the classical taste the college instilled in him, the religious instruction of the fathers served only to arouse his skepticism and mockery. He witnessed the last sad years of Louis XIV and was never to forget the distress and the military disasters of 1709 nor the horrors of religious persecution. He retained, however, a degree of admiration for the sovereign, and he remained convinced that the enlightened kings are the indispensable agents of progress.

He decided against the study of law after he left college. Employed as secretary at the French embassy in The Hague, he became infatuated with the daughter of an adventurer. Fearing scandal, the French ambassador sent him back to Paris. Despite his father’s wishes, he wanted to devote himself wholly to literature, and he frequented the Temple, then the centre of freethinking society. After the death of Louis XIV, under the morally relaxed Regency, Voltaire became the wit of Parisian society, and his epigrams were widely quoted. But when he dared to mock the dissolute regent, the duc d’Orléans, he was banished from Paris and then imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year (1717). Behind his cheerful facade, he was fundamentally serious and set himself to learn the accepted literary forms. In 1718, after the success of Oedipe, the first of his tragedies, he was acclaimed as the successor of the great classical dramatist Jean Racine and thenceforward adopted the name of Voltaire. The origin of this pen name remains doubtful. It is not certain that it is the anagram of Arouet le jeune (i.e., the younger). Above all he desired to be the Virgil that France had never known. He worked at an epic poem whose hero was Henry IV, the king beloved by the French people for having put an end to the wars of religion. This Henriade is spoiled by its pedantic imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid, but his contemporaries saw only the generous ideal of tolerance that inspired the poem. These literary triumphs earned him a pension from the regent and the warm approval of the young queen, Marie. He thus began his career of court poet.

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United with other thinkers of his day—literary men and scientists—in the belief in the efficacy of reason, Voltaire was a philosophe, as the 18th century termed it. In the salons, he professed an aggressive Deism, which scandalized the devout. He became interested in England, the country that tolerated freedom of thought; he visited the Tory leader Viscount Bolingbroke, exiled in France—a politician, an orator, and a philosopher whom Voltaire admired to the point of comparing him to Cicero. On Bolingbroke’s advice he learned English in order to read the philosophical works of John Locke. His intellectual development was furthered by an accident: as the result of a quarrel with a member of one of the leading French families, the chevalier de Rohan, who had made fun of his adopted name, he was beaten up, taken to the Bastille, and then conducted to Calais on May 5, 1726, whence he set out for London. His destiny was now exile and opposition.