Voltaire

French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher (real name François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), born in Paris into a well-off bourgeois family, educated by the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand, and who adopted the pseudonym 'Voltaire' after a first imprisonment in the Bastille in 1717 for satirical verses against the regent, the start of a life marked by recurrent conflicts with authority that led to several exiles, including a stay in England (1726–1729) whose empiricism and parliamentarism profoundly influenced him and which he documented admiringly in the Philosophical Letters (1734). A prolific author across virtually every genre — tragedy, epic poetry, history, philosophical essay and correspondence, of which thousands of letters survive — his posthumous fame rests above all on his role as a tireless polemicist and defender of religious tolerance, freedom of expression and judicial reform, an ability he deployed with particular effectiveness in his campaign to rehabilitate the memory of Jean Calas, a Protestant unjustly executed in Toulouse on charges of murdering his own son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism, a case he turned into an emblematic symbol of fanaticism and religious intolerance under the French Ancien Régime. His most widely read work, Candide, or Optimism (1759), is a satirical philosophical novel that ridicules with biting black humour Leibniz's optimistic philosophy — summed up in the doctrine that we live in 'the best of all possible worlds' — through the absurd, cumulative misfortunes of its protagonist, concluding with his most famous moral maxim: 'we must cultivate our garden', an exhortation to modest, practical action in the face of sterile metaphysical speculation. His Philosophical Dictionary (1764), structured as a series of brief, incisive entries on theological, political and moral topics, exemplifies his corrosive style and his critical deism, hostile to both atheism and ecclesiastical dogmatism. Regarded even in his lifetime as the most influential intellectual figure in Europe, his fight against 'infamy' — the term he used for institutionalised fanaticism and superstition — makes him one of the intellectual fathers of anticlericalism and modern secularism.

What are Voltaire's main ideas?What is Voltaire's most important work?How would you summarize Voltaire's thought?

21 works

Themes addressed

The self and self-knowledge Ethics and virtue

Quotes

“We must cultivate our garden.”
Candide

← All authors