Voltaire, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET DE, was born on 24th November 1694 in Paris, where his father, François Arouet, held a responsible post in the Chambre des Comptes. His mother, who died during his childhood, was well-born and a friend of the famous Ninon de L'Enclos. His godfather, the Abbé de Châteauneuf, exerted a pernicious influence on the precocious boy, and taught him to scoff at religion. In his ninth year he entered the Collège Louis-le-Grand, the chief French seminary of the Jesuits. He soon distinguished himself as a versifier, and the college authorities thought worthy of print his ode to St Genevieve. Although it was devotional in tone, the letters of his schoolboy days are those of a youthful sceptic. Before he had entered his teens he was introduced to Ninon de L'Enclos, who was so struck by him that she left him a legacy of 2000 francs with which to buy books. Leaving college at seventeen, he was destined by his father for the bar, but the study of law disgusted him. His poetic talents, lively conversation, and already pronounced scepticism procured him a welcome from the so-called 'Society of the Temple,' among the members of which were the Anaerontic Abbé de Chaulieu and the Duc de Sully, with other men of rank. Alarmed by the dissipated life which he was leading, his father gladly saw him admitted into the suite of his godfather's brother, the Marquis de Châteauneuf, who after the treaty of Utrecht was appointed French ambassador to Holland; but in consequence of an intrigue with a young lady Arouet, after a few months' stay at the Hague, was sent home in disgrace. In obedience to the command of his exasperated father he entered the office of an attorney, but his stay in it was short, and in a few months more he obtained notoriety as the author of a satire on his successful rival in the poetic competition for a prize offered by the French Academy. After the death in 1715 of Louis XIV. Arouet was suspected of lampooning the regent, the Duc d'Orleans, and was banished for several months from Paris. The evidence that he was the author of a subsequent lampoon, accusing the regent of detestable crimes, satisfied the authorities of his guilt, and he was thrown into the Bastille (May 1717), where he was confined for nearly a year. Meanwhile he had written his tragedy Edipe, and had begun a poem, the hero of which was Henry IV. of France. With his liberation from the Bastille he assumed the name of Voltaire, which is supposed to be an anagram of Arouet l(e) j(e)une. Edipe was performed in Paris (18th November 1718) and was triumphantly successful. His next dramatic attempts were, comparatively, failures, and he devoted himself to the completion of his poem on
Henry IV., which was to be published by subscription. But he had selected for a hero a prince whose chief distinction was the championship of the Protestant cause, and the poem contained praises of religious toleration and an unflattering description of the papacy. All this induced the authorities to refuse the sanction needed for publication. Voltaire had the poem surreptitiously printed at Rouen (1723) and smuggled into Paris, when, as La Ligue ou Henri le Grand, Poème épique, it was widely read and greatly admired. Voltaire was pushing his way at court, and being patronised by the newly-wedded queen of Louis XV., when there occurred the catastrophe which drove him from France. A certain Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, a scion of the great house of Rohan, addressing him contemptuously as a parvenu, Voltaire retorted with spirit, and seems to have written and circulated some caustic epigrams on the man who had insulted him. The chevalier's revenge was to have Voltaire cruelly beaten by his hirelings. The authorities refusing him proper redress, Voltaire resolved on challenging the cowardly author of the outrage, with the result that Voltaire was once more thrown into the Bastille. After a short imprisonment, he was liberated on the condition that he would proceed forthwith to England, where he landed about the end of May 1726.
Voltaire brought with him letters of introduction to several persons of station. Bolingbroke, with whom he had been intimate in France and who was now in England, made him known to Pope and his circle. He made the acquaintance of Peterborough, Chesterfield, the Herveys, and heard from the Duchess of Marlborough anecdotes of the times of Queen Anne. He became more or less intimate with Young, with Thomson, and with Gay. Having learned to read English with ease, and even to write it intelligibly, he acquired some knowledge of Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Butler, and a familiarity with what Pope had written, with Addison's Cato, and with the so-called dramatists of the Restoration. He was strongly attracted to Locke among philosophers, and he mastered the elements of Sir Isaac Newton's astronomical physics. Bolingbroke's conversation and the writings of the English Deists furnished him with many of the weapons of which he made use in his subsequent attacks on the theology of Christendom. George II.'s consort, Queen Caroline, accepted his dedication to her of the Henriade, the new form of La Ligue (the publication of which had been one of the objects of his visit to England); and the list of subscribers to it included with the king and queen a number of the nobility and gentry. When he was permitted to return to France early in 1729, after a residence of nearly three years in England, he took with him, among other fruits of his literary industry in exile, his History of Charles XII. and the materials for his Letters on the English. The letters were full of contrasts, certain to offend the ruling powers in France, between English liberty, political, and especially intellectual, on the one hand, and French despotism of every kind on the other.
On his return to Paris Voltaire laid the foundation of what became great wealth, by the sagacious purchase of shares in a government lottery, and by speculations in the corn-trade, to the profits of which were added a few years afterwards those arising from large army contracts. He formed a very close intimacy with Madame du Châtelet (q.v.), a lady of distinguished connections, very clever, accomplished, and scientific, whose husband was a cipher. He had a château, Cirey, in Champagne, and thither Voltaire fled in the summer of 1734, an order having been issued for his arrest on the publication, unauthorised by him, of his Letters on the English, accompanied as they were by heterodox comments on Pascal's Thoughts. Soon he and Madame du Châtelet made Cirey their headquarters. At Cirey Voltaire continued La Pucelle, a shameless libel on Joan of Arc; wrote dramas, Merope and Mahomet among them; poetry, philosophical and other; his Treatise on Metaphysics; much of his Siècle de Louis Quatorze and Les Mœurs et l'Esprit des Nations, with his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. Here he fitted up a laboratory and studied physics and chemistry; and here he received (August 1736) the first letter written to him by his admirer, the Crown-prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick the Great. Since the appearance of his Letters on the English he had been out of favour at court. But he wrote at the instance of his friend the Duc de Richelieu a dramatic piece, the Princesse de Navarre, which was performed on the occasion of the Dauphin's marriage (February 1745); and its adroit adulation pleased Louis XV. This and the patronage of Louis's new mistress, Madame de Pompadour, procured him the appointments of royal historiographer and of gentleman-in-ordinary to the king, as well as his election to the French Academy—distinctions which he sorrowfully owned were due to anything but his really meritorious contributions to the literature of his country. The court favour which he now enjoyed proved to be fitful. In 1747 an imprudent speech at a court card-party drove him to take refuge with an old friend, the Duchesse de Maine, for whose amusement he now wrote Zadig and others of those oriental tales which are among the most popular of his writings. When he was allowed to reappear at court, some injudiciously expressed flattery of Madame de Pompadour excited the indignation of the queen, and Voltaire had again to migrate. Oddly enough he and Madame du Châtelet became the welcome guests at Lunéville of ex-King Stanislaus, the French queen's father. A liaison with a young officer resulted in the death (September 1749) of Madame du Châtelet after she had given birth to a child of whom her new lover was the father.
The king of Prussia had more than once urged Voltaire to reside permanently at his court. But Voltaire would not consent unless he were to be accompanied by Madame du Châtelet, and to this arrangement Frederick had an insuperable objection. By her death a chief obstacle was removed. In July 1750 Voltaire found himself at Berlin, with the office of king's chamberlain, a pension of 20,000 francs, and board and lodging in one of the royal palaces. But the friendship of the king and the poet was soon disturbed. Voltaire entered into some questionable financial and other operations in association with a Berlin Jew. The result was a lawsuit, and during the proceedings disclosures discreditable to Voltaire irritated the king against him. Frederick was still more gravely offended by Voltaire's satirical criticisms on Maupertuis, whom the king had made president of his Academy of Science and for whom he had a great regard; and in March 1753 Frederick and Voltaire parted, never to meet again. The chief literary result of Voltaire's stay in Prussia was the completion and publication of his Siècle de Louis Quatorze.
Soon after leaving Prussia Voltaire was arrested and kept for several weeks in confinement at Frankfort, partly through the bungling of Frederick's representative in that city, who had been instructed to recover from Voltaire a volume, privately printed, of the king's poems. Voltaire avenged himself by writing the well-known and malicious sketch of Frederick's character and account of his habits, which, however, was first printed, and then surreptitiously, after the writer's death. After various wanderings Voltaire settled, early in 1755, near Geneva. From Les Délices, as he called his first Swiss home, he removed about 1758 to Ferney (q.v.), which was in French territory, some 4 miles from Geneva on the northern shore of the lake. During the first five years of his settlement in Switzerland appeared his greatest historical work, L'esprit des Nations, his pessimistic poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, and its prose-pendant, the famous Candide. The suspension of the Encyclopédie by the French government, and the sentence of the parliament of Paris condemning to be burned by the public executioner a harmless poem of his own on natural religion, impelled Voltaire to issue his celebrated declaration of war against L'Infame. In 1762 appeared the first of those writings assailing the Christian faith which flowed from his pen until the end of his life. In the same year occurred at Toulouse the judicial murder of Jean Calas (q.v.), falsely accused of having, from Protestant zeal, killed one of his sons to prevent him from becoming a Roman Catholic. Voltaire exerted himself strenuously, and at last successfully, to have the sentence annulled, and to rescue other members of the Calas family from the punishment to which, as unjustly convicted accomplices, they had been condemned. This and similar efforts on behalf of victims of French fanaticism procured Voltaire the gratitude of numbers of his countrymen, the applause of other nations, and, ever since, the admiration of many to whom his attacks on Christianity have been and are utterly repugnant. It is not so well remembered that even in theology he endeavoured to exert a conservative influence, and that he was regarded as a reactionary by the adherents of the atheism which during his later years became fashionable in France. The unadulterated atheism of Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature, issued in 1770, he vehemently opposed; and five years before the appearance of that work Horace Walpole reported from Paris the speech of a French lady who said contemptuously of Voltaire: 'He is a bigot, he is a Theist' (Il est bigot, c'est un déiste).
The varied activity of Voltaire in his old age was immense. Among the works which he composed while domiciled in Switzerland were histories of Russia under Peter the Great and of the Age of Louis XV.; the Dictionnaire Philosophique, still often dipped into; a Treatise on Toleration; and Fragments on the History of India; besides tales, philosophical treatises, and tragedies and comedies. He kept up an enormous correspondence, resuming that with Frederick, and entering into a new one with the most friendly of his crowned admirers, the Empress Catharine of Russia, whom he urged with great but fruitless fervour to drive the Turk out of Europe, and to revive, as far as it could be revived, the ancient glory of Greece. He looked keenly after his many and widely-spread investments, made so successfully that his later income was computed to amount to what would now be £20,000 a year. He farmed, reclaiming waste land, planting, rearing poultry, and breeding horses. What is more striking, he established at Ferney a watch-making industry which competed with that of Geneva, and which he fostered by appeals on its behalf to all and sundry, from the Empress Catharine downwards.
The death in 1774 of Louis XV. removed the principal obstacle to a visit of Voltaire to Paris, but it was not paid until 1778, when he was in his eighty-fourth year, and then ostensibly to superintend the arrangements for the performance of his last tragedy, Irène. After an absence of thirty-four years he arrived in Paris in February 1778, and was welcomed enthusiastically by all that was most distinguished socially and intellectually. When he drove out the progress of his carriage was obstructed by the pressure of immense and acclaiming crowds: 'It was he who defended the Calas' was the reply of one among them who was asked by his neighbour the reason for the prevalent excitement. Frantic, literally, was the enthusiasm, which a house crowded to suffocation displayed for hours on the occasion of his visit to the Comédie Française to witness the representation of Irène; one of the leaders of the applause being the Comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles X. These and other excitements, telling on the infirm frame of the old man, brought on an attack of illness which was aggravated by an injudicious administration of opiates. Delirium alternating with torpor supervened, but with intervals of lucid consciousness. A few hours before his death two priests entered the sick-room, and to a professional appeal from one of them he replied, 'Let me die in peace.' The end came on the night of the 30th May 1778.
Of the numerous French biographies of Voltaire much the best is the elaborate work of Gustave Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et la Société du XVIIIe Siècle (2d ed. 8 vols. 1887); and Bengesco's Voltaire: Bibliographie de ses Œuvres (4 vols. 1882-91) may also be consulted. An American life of Voltaire by the late James Parton (1881) is copious and displays industry. Mr John Morley's Voltaire (1872; new ed. 1886) is more a criticism than a biography. Strauss's six lectures appeared in 1871 (4th ed. Bonn, 1878). There is a biography of Voltaire by General Hamley in the 'Foreign Classics' (1877), and another by the writer of this article in the 'Great Writers' series (1892). See also J. Clurton Collis's Bolingbroke, and Voltaire in England (1886).