EARLY LIFE
He was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris on November 21, 1694 to François Arouet and Marie-Marguerite Daumart or D'Aumard.
Voltaire was a nom de plume an anagram of Arovet L(e) I(eune), the Latinized spelling of his surname, François adopted the name Voltaire after his first spell in prison in 1718.
 |
| Portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, c. 1724 |
As an infant François had a feeble constitution and the baptismal rites were not performed for months after his birth as it was felt he wouldn't survive.
His father Francis Arouet was the treasurer of local revenues and a Jansenist, (a movement aimed at reforming the French Roman Catholic Church from within). He appears to have been strict, but neither inhospitable nor tyrannical.
François' mother Margaret belonged to a noble family. She died when he was seven-years-old. Not much is known about her.
He was the fifth child of his parents, preceded by twin boys (one of whom survived), a girl, Marguerite-Catherine, and another boy who died young.
Marguerite-Catherine Arouet, of whom her younger brother was very fond, married early; the elder brother, Armand, was a strong Jansenist and had a poor relationship with François.
François was nicknamed "Zozo" by his family,
The Abbé de Châteauneuf, a friend of François' mother, instructed him in belles lettres and deism, and young François showed a faculty for facile verse-making.
In his earliest school years the Abbé presented François to the famous atheist author Ninon de Lenclos. When she died, tragically, in 1705, she left him money so he could buy books.
At the age of ten François was sent to the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, and remained there till 1711. There, he was taught latin, theology, and rhetoric. Though he deprecated the education he had received, it formed the basis of Voltaire's considerable knowledge, and probably kindled his lifelong devotion to the stage.
CAREER
In August 1711, at the age of seventeen, François left school and returned home. The usual battle followed between a son who desired no profession but literature and a father who refused to consider literature a profession at all. So Voltaire studied law, at least nominally.
Voltaire pretended to work in Paris as an assistant to a notary, while secretly composing poetry. When his father found out, he sent Voltaire to study law in Caen, Normandy. But the young man continued to write, producing essays and historical studies.
Voltaire's wit made him popular among some of the aristocratic families with whom he mixed. In 1713, his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands, the marquis de Châteauneuf, who was the abbé's brother. However Voltaire embarked on a scandalous romance, so his father ordered him home.
In December 1721 Voltaire's father died leaving him property, rather more than four thousand livres a year, which was soon increased by a pension of half the amount from the regent. From then on he had private means and was not dependent on rich benefactors meaning Voltaire could write what he liked.
Voltaire lived in a France which was oppressively mis-governed and overtaxed and the writer was not shy in lampooning the ruling class. In 1716 Voltaire wrote a satirical poem about the Duke of Orleans that resulted in a nearly year-long imprisonment at the Bastille. He was imprisoned from May 16, 1717 to April 15, 1718 in a windowless cell with ten-foot-thick walls.
The end of 1725 brought a disastrous close to this period of his life. When Voltaire was insulted by the chevalier de Rohan, he replied with his usual sharpness of tongue, and shortly afterwards, when dining with the Duke of Sully, Voltaire was called out and beaten by the chevalier's hirelings, while Rohan watched. Seeking redress, Voltaire challenged de Rohan to a duel.
On the morning appointed for the duel Voltaire was arrested and sent for the second time to the Bastille. He was kept in confinement a fortnight, and was then packed off to England in accordance with his own request. He spent three years in exile there and said on his return to France from England in 1729 he said of his temporary home . "Imagine a country with 350 religions and only one sauce."
Voltaire was a canny businessman. One day in 1729 he had supper with the Mathematician, Lacondamine, who told him that the new Paris lottery had been miscalculated. If all the tickets were bought, there would be a clear profit to the buyers of a million francs. The pair bought all the tickets they could — and kept winning. The French government cottoned on and took Voltaire to court, but he was found to have done nothing illegal.
Voltaire became a wealthy man from both the Paris lottery and crafty investing in the slave trade. For the rest of his life he kept a pension list from which he financed struggling writers and victims of injustice.
By the 1750s, Voltaire was a celebrity renowned throughout Europe. Famous visitors came from everywhere to see the renowned free-thinker and discuss his work with him.
 |
| Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton, 1738 |
Though Voltaire made fun of royalty, he lived at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia between 1750 and 1753 and accepted a pension from him.
Once when Frederick the Great sent Voltaire some verses asking him to correct and criticise them, the French philosopher replied "See, what a quantity of his dirty linen, the King has sent me to wash".
French Huguenot merchant Jean Calas, who was wrongly convicted of killing his son, died on March 10, 1763 after being tortured by authorities. The event inspired Voltaire to begin campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform.
In January 1754 Louis XV banned Voltaire from Paris, so he moved to Geneva. In 1759 Voltaire purchased the estate of Ferney in France, near the Swiss border where he lived until 1778.
 |
| Voltaire's château at Ferney, France. By Brücke-Osteuropa |
WORKS
Voltaire wrote all kinds of literature. He was known as the Great Mocker as he railed against the things he hated. Priests, kings, tyrants and oppressors and especially the Regent Phillipe d’Orléans all felt the power of his poisoned pen.
Voltaire first came to fame with his 1718 anti-clerical work Oedipe.
In 1747 Voltaire wrote Zadig, an anti-clerical novel about a virtuous youth who can't understand why he is so unlucky. An angel explains that some good comes out of evil and that nothing happens by chance. Everything is predestined.
Voltaire 's most famous work was Candide, ou l'Optimisme, a short satirical book, in which all manner of adversities were heaped upon Candide and his cheerful tutor Dr Pangloss, who stood up to them philosophically. Candide was completed in 1759, four years after the Lisbon earthquake and the work was intended to satirize philosophical optimism and to question the goodness of God. The character of the incurable optimist Dr Pangloss, who declared "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" was intended to poke fun at Rousseau's theories.
 |
| a frontispiece of Voltaire's Candide, or Optimism. |
L'Ingénu, published in 1767, was about a Canadian youth, who having spent 20 years amongst the Huron Indians, came to France and was astonished at the ways of Roman Catholicism and Louis XV's bureaucracy.
He wrote between fifty and sixty plays (including a few unfinished ones). Ironically, despite Voltaire's comic talent, he wrote only one good comedy, Nanine, but many good tragedies -- two of them, Zaire and Mérope, are ranked among the ten or twelve best plays of the whole French classical school.
At the time of his death. Voltaire left behind him over fourteen thousand known letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets. He was read by Frederick the Great, Napoleon and Catherine the Great.
Upon his death Catherine the Great purchased Voltaire's entire collection of works and moved it to The Hermitage in Russia.
Voltaire summed up his satirical career thus: "My one and only prayer to God is a very short one. 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' " God has granted it.
BELIEFS
Voltaire was raised in Jansenism and later became a deist and a critic of the intolerance and petty squabbles in both Protestant and Catholic Churches.
He was the high priest of the Enlightenment, which can be summed up by "judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers". Unfortunately this led to Voltaire questioning basic biblical principles. He referred to Christianity as the "infamous thing" and claimed "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." His views provoked seismic waves of shock and disgust in the churches. Voltaire had erred in believing the falseness and hypocrisy of most of the mid-eighteenth century religion as representing true Christianity.
In Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary he wrote regarding the hymns of the day: "The most High has a decided taste for vocal music, provided it be lugubrious and gloomy enough."
 |
| Voltaire; A Philosophical Dictionary. 2nd ed., London: 1824 |
Voltaire once prophesied that in "another century and there will not be a Bible on Earth." Ironically a century after his death his home was occupied by the Geneva Bible Society.
Though a meat eater himself, Voltaire was sympathetic to the philosophy of vegetarianism. That viewpoint had come increasingly into vogue in 18th century France due to the publication by Antonio Cocchi of the teachings of the ancient Greek vegetarian Pythagoras.
The French philosophical writer was scornful of the medical profession in his day. Voltaire quipped that doctors pour "drugs of which they knew little about, to cure diseases of which they knew less, into human beings of which they knew nothing." Also he jested that "the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease."
PERSONAL LIFE
Voltaire was single all his life.
When Voltaire started working for the Marquis de Châteauneuf in The Hague he fell in love with Olympe Dunoyer (known as 'Pimpette') a Protestant girl from a poor family, Their relationship, considered scandalous, was discovered by de Châteauneuf and Voltaire's father stopped the affair by procuring a lettre de cachet, though he never used it.
At the age of thirty-nine, Voltaire started a sixteen-year liaison with the philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet (December 17, 1706 – September 10, 1749) , the Divine Emilie. She was twenty-seven, married, and the mother of three children. "I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did," Voltaire wrote in his memoirs, "and who decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind."
Voltaire lived with Emilie Du Châtelet for many years. She was the co-author with Voltaire of a commentary on Isaac Newton and a kindred spirit.
 |
| Portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour of Émilie du Châtelet |
It was Voltaire who originated the story of Isaac Newton and his apple. Apparently he was told the story by Mrs Conduit, Newton’s niece.
Arrogant and greedy, Voltaire was generous to his friends but a merciless satirist and mocker to his enemies. So sharp was his tongue that no one is on record as having beaten him in an argument.
Voltaire was said to have drowned 40-50 cups of coffee daily. On his death bed he quipped "I am dying of 250,000 cups of coffee".
DEATH
Visiting Paris for the opening of his latest tragic play, Irene in February 1778, the 83-year-old Voltaire attended a boisterous party to celebrate and exhausted himself meeting all the people who had turned out to acclaim him. He believed he was about to die but then recovered for a time. However, Voltaire soon became ill again and he died on May 30, 1778. His last words were "Do let me die in peace."
 |
| House in Paris where Voltaire died. By Edal Anton Lefterov - Own work, |
Because of his criticism of the church Voltaire was denied burial in church ground. He was finally buried at an abbey in Champagne. In 1791 his remains were moved to a resting place at The Panthéon in Paris.
His final resting place, unfortunately, became a garbage heap. In 1814 an unknown group robbed Voltaire's grave and disposed of him in a nearby garbage heap, no one the wiser (for more than 50 years) until his sarcophagus was inspected and discovered... empty. All that remains of Voltaire is his heart - at the Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.
Edmund Bentley later wrote:
It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.
No comments:
Post a Comment