THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE (1694-1778)

VOLTAIRE was the pen name of Francois-Marie Arouet, a prolific writer and philosopher whose vast oeuvre contained multiple literary forms including plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, over 21,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets. Many of his most popular prose works were in the form of swashbuckling, episodic, courtly romances. These were often written as polemics and contained scathing prefaces explaining the author’s motives.

Voltaire’s best-known work, Candide (1759), was constructed around a sustained and withering attack on the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and ironically satirises Leibniz’s particular brand of philosophical and moral optimism. Although regarded in some quarters as holding somewhat cynical views on human nature, Voltaire nonetheless believed that humans could find moral virtue through reason and that reason allied to observation of the natural world was sufficient to determine the existence of God.

Voltaire’s principal philosophical works are contained in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (“Philosophical Dictionary”), published in 1764, which was comprised of articles, essays and pamphlets attacking the French political establishment and in particular the Church. Among the many civil causes Voltaire advocated in his essays were the right to a fair trial, the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and tolerance of other religions. He also sought to expose and denounce the hypocrisies and injustices he saw as inherent in the ancien régime, the social and political structure of France between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The ancien regime, for Voltaire, was predicated on an imbalance of power, loaded firmly in favour of the clergy and noble aristocracy at the expense of the commoners and middle classes who were suppressed by crippling and corrupt systems of taxation. As the Church seemed to be not only complicit in this corruption and injustice but also a principal part of the state apparatus, the clergy naturally bore the brunt of Voltaire’s ire. Deeply opposed to organised religion, Voltaire was highly critical of the Church in Rome, and even held the view that the Bible was an outdated legal and moral reference guide, citing it was the work of man and not the inspired word of God.

There were, however, some curious inconsistencies in the radical positions that Voltaire chose to adopt. Capable of constructing impassioned and erudite arguments for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in one essay, Voltaire would then reject the tenets of democracy for providing a voice to the ill-informed and ignorant masses in his next essay. Like Plato, Voltaire reviewed the role of the monarch in society from a position of modified absolutism – a system whereby the king or queen rules under the guidance of a group of appointed advisers who have the best concerns of the kingdom and its subjects at heart, for it is in the intertest of the monarch to ensure wealth and stability in society at large.

Voltaire’s oft-quoted assertion that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him” has led to the misconception that he was an atheist. In fact, despite his opposition to the Church, Voltaire believed in God and built his own private chapel. The quote given is taken from one of Voltaire’s polemical poems, Epistle to the Author of the Book, The Three Imposters, and can be taken to mean that the central question of the existence of God is largely immaterial, as many civilisations have created gods to explain natural phenomena. As a follower of deism, Voltaire rejected the mysticism and strictures of religious teaching, believing that reason and nature provide the basis for spiritual beliefs: “It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”

Voltaire is best known for his memorable aphorisms. One of the most oft-cited quotations attributed to Voltaire about freedom of speech – “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – is, however, totally apocryphal. It was actually written by the English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 biography of Voltaire, The Friends of Voltaire.