VOLTAIRE, vol"tar', FRANQOIS MARIE AROUET DE:

French writer and deist; b. in Paris Nov. 21, 1694; d. there May 30, 1778.

Earlier Life.

He was educated by the Jesuits in College Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he learnt "nothing but Latin and nonsense." His father intended him for the law, but his natural talent, no less than the levity of his disposition, drew him with irresistible force into literary life--the theater, the pamphlet, the salons, where the efforts were short, and the triumphs rapid. He had wit, taste, a wonderful talent for turning everything into verse, and a still more wonderful talent for dropping innuendoes, malicious or lewd, according to circumstances. He wrote small poems, satirical or complimentary, and said smart things at the supper-tables of dukes and abb&escute;s. In 1713 he obtained a diplomatic position as secretary to the French ambassador to Holland. But at The Hague he was most ridiculously taken in by a lady of semi-standing--a certain Madame du Noyer, whose daughter he fell in love with and tried to allure into an elopement. He was discharged, and sent back to Paris; and Madame du Noyer repaid herself for her troubles by publishing his love-letters. In 1714 he competed for the prize of the academy, but failed to obtain it. In 1716 some vicious lampoons on the regent and the Duchess of Berri were generally ascribed to him, and brought him to the Bastile, where, in the study of Homer and Vergil, and the preparation of his first tragedy, Oedipe, he spent eleven months. Soon after his release, the tragedy was brought on the stage with great success; and the success was followed up with still greater energy. The Henriade, a large epic on Henry IV., which he had begun in the Bastile, he printed, though he had not succeeded in obtaining the approbation of the royal censor, and it at once made his fame and his fortune. But Voltaire's ambition was always a little ahead of his powers: Artémise failed completely; Mariamne, partially. The Chevalier de Rohan, in order to avenge himself for some insolent repartee, had him beaten in the street by his footmen. Vol taire challenged him; but later was put in the Bastile, and released only on the condition that he immediately leave for England.

Maturity.

From 1726 to 1729 he resided in London; and acquaintance with English character and institutions, English literature and philosophy, exercised a profound influence on him. It sobered his temper a little; it gave him a taste for science and its methods of research; and it developed his sense of the social value of truth. He was much struck by Newton's great discovery as expounded to him by Dr. Samuel Clark in 1726; and by the effect on the English mind of Newton's death the following year. Later by his Élémens de la philosophie de Newton (1738), and La métaphysique de Newton (1740), he contributed much to make the views of Newton accepted, not only in France, but on the continent in general. From Locke he derived his whole psychology; from the English Deists (see Deism), he learned how to attack the traditional, supernaturalistic, dogmatic claims of the prevailing beliefs, and he used the weapons of the Deistic writers in his onslaught upon the credulity and abuses of the Roman Catholic Church; from English history and institutions he gained his social and political ideas. There is a direct and demonstrable connection between the revolution of 1789 and his Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733, Fr. eds. later), one of the brightest and most characteristic of his polemical writings. He also made a painstaking study of Shakespeare and Milton and the other great English writers. On his return to France in 1729, he soon found out that Paris was still unsafe for him. In 1734 his Lettres were publicly burnt by order of the parliament as subversive to the State, the Church, and public morality. From that time until 1749 he made his home chiefly at Cirey, in the house of Madame du Châtelet, a lady far whose mathematical and philosophical talent he felt great respect. Whatever may be said of their personal relations in other respects, she stimulated and held him up to his highest capacity for literary production. During this period he wrote some of his best tragedies--Zaïre, Alzire, Mahomet, Mérope,; completed Charles XII. and began Siècle de Louis XIV.; and sent out a score or more of polemical pamphlets, witty, malicious, indecent to an incredible degree, and an astonishing number of letters to all the most prominent persons in Europe. At the middle of the eighteenth century he stood as the greatest literary celebrity which the European civilization had ever produced, far exceeding Erasmus both in fame and power. And when, in 1750, he set out for Berlin, on the invitation of Frederick II., it was not a pensioner threading his way to the table of his patron, but the king of the pen coming to visit the king of the sword. Voltaire and Frederick admired each other. But Voltaire admired in Frederick only the general, and Frederick wanted to be admired as a poet; while, in Voltaire, Frederick admired only the poet, and Voltaire wanted to be admired as a statesman. Ludicrous conflicts arose, almost from the hour of their first meeting; and soon the conflicts grew into a continuous warfare. At last in 1752 the climax was reached when, under an assumed name, Voltaire held up to ridicule the president of the Berlin Academy. In March of the following year he was permitted to leave the city only to be arrested, by command of the irate king, at Frankfort, where he underwent irritating humiliations, which indeed he had provoked, for which also he took ample vengeance in a scurrilous lampoon on Frederick's private life. Thus ended the strange friendship which on account of the idiosyncrasies of the two concerned contained all the elements of a comic tragedy.

The last part of his life Voltaire spent at Ferney, an estate he bought in the county of Gex (1758),

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conveniently situated near the Swiss frontier; and during this period some of the best features of his personal character came to light.

Later Life. There were forty-six miserable peas ants at Ferney when he bought the estate; when he died, there were 1,200 well-to-do inhabitants engaged in watch-making, silk-weaving, and other industries, and it was he who built their houses, bought their tools, and sold their produc tions. His defense of Jean Calas the Huguenot (see Rabaut, Paul) and protection of Sirven show a humanity and courage wholly admirable, while his unwearied endeavors to rehabilitate the names and fortunes of these and of La Barre and Count Lally add only luster to his repu tation for justice and fair play. But his writings and among them are some of his most prominent works: Essai sur les Mceurs et l'Esprit des Nations, Dictionnaire Phitosophique-show that his polemical passion had become intensified almost to the burst ing-point, that his whole mental energy had concen trated itself around the famous motto, Ecrosez l'in fame (" crush the infamous one "), with which he ended every letter he sent to his friends. L'infame meant originally, the Roman Catholic Church, then any church which has the support of the State for the enforcement of its doctrine and discipline, and finally it came to mean all religion, so far as it claims a supernatural origin. On this point his hatred is insatiable. It pervades all his writing, from Can dide and Le Diner du comte de Boulinvilliers to La Pucelle and L'Orpheline de la Chine; and in his minor pamphlets newspaper articles letters, it drags him not only below his dignity, but beneath decency. This was not the estimate of his own time. When he went to Paris in 1778, he was received with such enthusiasm and such ovations as the world had hardly ever seen before. But the excitement thereby produced was too much for his strength; he fell ill, took too big a dose of opium, and died in delirium.

Voltaire made his mark in literature as a poet. His Zaire, Mahomet, and Merope were considered the very acme of tragic art. To the public for which Voltaire wrote, tragic art was only a

His Poetry maze of intricate conventional rules; and but he mastered those rules so comPhilosophy. pletely that his audience sat enchanted, transported, and gazed upon his tragedies as upon clouds of "woven wind" floating in the sunshine. Of more solid worth are his historical works. His true merit lies in his respect for facts, for which he may very well have been indebted to Newton and Locke. For history as an organic movement with inner laws of development he had no more conception than others of his age. In part owing to him, history has since his day taken its place as essential to all liberal education. As to his philosophy, strictly speaking Voltaire was no philosopher at all. The higher methods of extracting truth he had never learned and he was by natural disposition incapable of that sustained effort of thought without which systematic views can not be formed. Nevertheless, he is the true representative of the " Age of Reason "; and the great boast of that age was just its philosophy. Voltaire was not an atheist. He could sneer as heartily at the atheists as at the fanatics. His deism was partly a reaction against the corruption, cruelty, bigotry, and superstition of both Roman Catholics and Protestants in his day. As a Deist he started from the three well-known premises of Deism: God, the world, and between them no relation which can be represented under the form of divine revelation or special providence. But to Voltaire God is, because he is a necessity of thought: "if he were not, we would have to invent him." Of a personal relation between himself and God there was no trace; and, what is still worse, he did not understand that such a relation could truly exist. Of his general conception of God he often spoke with an undercurrent of cold indifference, illuminated now and then with sparks of cynicism, which, to men of strongly marked religious disposition, has made his works an abomination. His method was to attack not so much the principles as the alleged facts of Christianity, or to show the irreconcilability of one Christian notion with other necessary beliefs. He understood nothing of the deeper truths of the Gospel or the lives of its adherents. His criticism, so far as it related to the ultimate nature of Christianity, was literary, superficial, negative, and transitory. The immortality of the soul had no vital place in his thought. The world, on the contrary, was a very serious affair to Voltaire, and a thing he understood. As a critic, he stands in the very front rank. His instinct of truth was sharp and vivid. With that instinct he combined a never equaled power of illuminating statement. In the service of his van ity, envy, and malice, and used to cover up de liberate falsehoods and lies, his wit is often shocking. But the directness, clearness, and precision of his statement of a fact or an idea has still more often made truth irresistible; and without entering into the details of his activity, his victories, and his defeats, it may be generally said that his criticism developed in modern literature a sense for that which is simple, natural, and clear. See Deism, II, § 1.

C. A. Beckwith.

Bibliography: The "Works" have been repeatedly pub- lished-30 vols., Geneva, 1768-77; 70 vols., Kehl and i Paris, 1785-89; 54 vols., ib. 1800; 52 vols., with Condor- , ` ~ cet's Vie de Voltaire, ib. 1877-85; they appeared in Eng. ~y transl., 25 vols., London, 1781-65; and a splendid edi- ~I h',, ~. tion, with Life by Money, was issued in 42 vols., London and New York, 1901. For full list of works by and on Voltaire consult: G. Benegesco, Voltaire: bibliographic, 4 vols., Pans, 1882-90. On his life and works consult: !: (', ,, L. M. Chaudon, Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of M. de Voltaire, London, 1786; M. J. A. N. Caritat, Marquis de Condoreet, Vie de Voltaire, Kehl, 1789, Paris, 1822, 1895, Eng. transl., 2 vols., London, 1790; E. M. G. Lepan, Vie politique, litteraire et morale de Voltaire, Paris. 1817, 2d ed., 1819; Henry, Lord I Brougham, Lives of Men. of Letters, vol. iv., London, 1845; J. M. Querard, Forney- Voltaire, Pans, 1848; J. Janin, Le ' . , i 'Roi Voltaire, 3d ed., Paris, 1861; M. U. Maynard, Voltaire, , so vie et sea oeuvres, 2 vols., Paris, 1867; B. H. C. K. van , i

der Wyck, Voltaire, Amsterdam, 1868; J. Morley, Volfaire, London, 1872, new ed., 1886; H. Beaune, Voltaire au college, so famille, sea etudes, sea premiers arms, Paris, 1873; E. B. Humley, Voltaire, Edinburgh, 1877; R. d'Argental, Histoire complete de la vie de Voltaire, NeuchBetel, 1878; E. Noel, Voltaire, sa vie et sea oeuvres, Paris, 1878; G. Norga, Voltaire, so vie, sea ceuvres, Paris, 1878; E. de Pompery, La Vie de Voltaire, Paris, 1878; J. Parton, Life of Voltaire, 2 vols., London, 1881; G. Renard, Vie de Voltaire, Paris, 1883; R. Kreiten, Voltaire, 2d ed.,

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Freiburg, 1885; V. Mahrenholts, Voltaire's Lebeu and Werke, part 2, Oppeln, 1885; E. Champion, Voltaire, Paris, 1893; F. Espinasse. Life of Voltaire, London, 1892; E. Faguet, Voltaire, Paris. 1895; S. O. Tallentyre, Life of Voltaire, 2 vols., London, 1903, new ed., New York, 1910; J. C. Collies, Voltaire, Monteaquieu and Rousseau in England, London, 1909.

On his philosophy, etc., consult: E. Bersot, La Philosophie de Voltaire, Paris, 1848; L. L. Bungener, Voltaire et son temps, 2 vols. Paris, 1850, 2d ed., 1851, Eng transl., Edinburgh, 1854; J. B. Meyer, Voltaire and Rousseau, in ahrer aocialen Bedeutung, Berlin, 1856; A. Anot, Etudes our Voltaire, Paris, 1864; J. Barni, Histoire des ides morales, pp. 211-349, Paris, 1865; D. F. Strauss, Voltaire: sechs Yortrllge, 5th ed., Bonn, 1878, Fr. transl., Paris, 1876; H. Martin, Voltaire et Rousseau et la phiZosophie du d%x-huiti6rne si4cle, Paris, 1878 Mousainot, Voltaire et 1'A'gliae, Neuehhtel, 1878 J. Stephen, Horse sabbaticce, 2d series, pp. 211-279, London; 1892; R. Urbach, Voltaire's Verhttlcn%ss zu Newton and Locks, Halle, 1900; P. Sahnann, Voltaire's Geiateaart and Ciedankenwelt; Stuttgart, 1909.