Voltaire was an 18th century French writer and philosopher.
From his real name François Marie Arouet, Voltaire was born on November 21, 1694 (although he claimed to have been born on February 20 of that year) in Paris where he died on May 30, 1778. He was admitted to the French Academy in 1746.
François-Marie Arouet Le Jeune, later known as Voltaire, was officially born on November 21, 1694 in Paris, and baptized the next day. On several occasions he will affirm that he was actually born on February 20, 1694, the baptism would have been delayed because of the little hope he had of staying alive. He was the last child of François Arouet, a wealthy notary and Jansenist sympathizer whom his son hated, and of Marie Marguerite d'Aumart, from a noble family in Poitou.
Voltaire said he was the son of Monsieur de Rochebrune, "musketeer, officer, author" (songwriter).
His mother died in 1701 at the age of about 41. His father became a notary, a lucrative post at the Court of Auditors.
Studies:1704-1711
He began his studies in 1704 at the Jesuit college, the future Lycée Louis-le-Grand. There he studied rhetoric and philosophy brilliantly, and won first prizes. This education introduced him to the pleasures of conversation and theatre. He became friends with the Argenson brothers, René-Louis and Marc-Pierre, future ministers of King Louis XV.
Around 1706 he composed a tragedy Amulius and Numitor; excerpts will later be found which will be published in the 19th century. After his philosophy class, he left college in 1711 to enroll in the law school in Paris.
Libertine
In 1712 he attempted the competition for the Academy with an ode, Le Vœu de Louis XIII, but failed.
Godson of the abbot of Châteauneuf, he was introduced into a libertine society, the Société du Temple, and received a bequest from Ninon de Lenclos. He likes to show off his literary talents and his casual and rebellious spirit which unfolds in epigrams.
In 1713, at the age of 19, he left for Holland as secretary to M. de Châteauneuf, brother of his godfather. He was chased out of the French Embassy in Holland because of his affair with Mlle du Noyer, known as Pimpette, whom he wanted to kidnap, following Madame du Noyer's complaint. Monsieur Arouet threatens his son to send him to Santo Domingo and disinherit him.
In 1714, he wrote a pamphlet, Lettre à M. D***, and a satire, Le Bourbier ou le Parnasse and began his tragedy Oedipus. Having become a notary's clerk, his profession hardly inspires him.
Exiles and prisons
In 1716 he was exiled to Sully-sur-Loire for five months for writing verses on the incestuous loves of the Regent Philippe III of Orléans. In 1717, accused of having written pamphlets against the Regent, he escaped deportation to the islands (Antilles) but was imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year, between 1717 and 1718. He began La Henriade, ode to the king Henry IV. Released in April 1718, he was exiled to Châtenay-Malabry. He adopted the name of Voltaire and completed Oedipus, his first play, which met with success in November, a few months after his release from prison.
The years from 1719 to 1724 are years of worldliness.
In 1726, following an altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, Voltaire was again imprisoned in the Bastille.
Several hypotheses on the origin of the pseudonym "Voltaire" have been formulated and have long been debated:
* This would be the anagram of AROUET L(e) J(eune) or rather AROVET L(e) I(eune) in Latin capital letters where U is written V and J is written I. AROVETLI gives VOLTAIRE. This is the most serious hypothesis, and the most often mentioned in all publications.
* This would be the phonetic anagram of Airvault, name of a Poitevin town in 'where his family is from.
* It can also be the verb phrase meaning in old French that one "wanted-to-shut up" (vol-taire), because of his innovative thought.
* It may be the contraction of Voluntary with syncopation of the inner syllable on.
* We also think of the syllabic anagram and phonetic of “revolted”:revolted becomes re-volt-tai, which gives Voltaire.
N.B.:Modern criticism (in particular, and above all, the edition of La Pléiade and school textbooks) agrees today to admit the first hypothesis as the most probable.
In Great Britain
He then went into exile in Great Britain from 1726 to 1729, where he discovered the philosophy of John Locke, the scientific theories of Isaac Newton and the characteristic of the British monarchy, which he will ensure the popularization in France in the Letters philosophical.
Courtier
Voltaire then shared the life of Émilie du Chatelet, then returned to Paris where he pursued a career as a courtier before falling into disgrace.
At Frederick of Prussia
In 1750, he went to the court of Frederick II in Berlin, where a brilliant position awaited him, the chamberlain's key and a considerable salary. The king and the philosopher become friends, the first speaking French perfectly. But the two friends cannot hide their main traits for long, one his haughty humor and habit of being obeyed, the other his intellectual superiority and sharp wit. The estrangement is inevitable, and, in 1753, a quarrel of Voltaire with Maupertuis, that supports the king, precipitates the rupture, and Voltaire leaves Prussia. The most important work he published during his stay in Berlin was Le Siècle de Louis XIV.
From Geneva to Ferney
In 1755, he moved to Les Délices, near Geneva. Finally, in 1758, he bought an estate in Ferney, in the Pays de Gex, and Tournay, in French territory, but on the Franco-Geneva border (Geneva was then an independent state). He will develop the region, build, plant, sow and develop livestock. In the company of Mrs. Denis, his niece, governess and companion, he supported a thousand people, became a farmer, an architect, a manufacturer of watches and silk stockings. With his sense of the formula, he summarizes the enterprise:“A den of 40 savages has become an opulent little town inhabited by 1200 useful people”. Voltaire is no longer just the most famous man of his time:he has become a myth. From Saint Petersburg to Philadelphia, people await his publications like oracles. Artists, scholars, princes, ambassadors or just the curious go on pilgrimage to Ferney to visit this "innkeeper of Europe".
In 1778, he returned to Paris:the people of the capital welcomed him with such enthusiasm that some historians see this day of March 30 as "the first of the revolutionary days".
Two months before his death, on April 7, 1778, he became a Freemason in the Parisian lodge of the "Nine Sisters". It is possible that Voltaire was a Freemason before this date, but there is no formal proof.
He died in Paris on May 30, 1778. In February, 4 months before his death, he publicly declared:“I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, hating superstition. »
His ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris on July 11, 1791 after a grandiose ceremony.
By chance in history, his tomb is opposite that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he did not like - and did not understand - much.
His work
Voltaire was above all a writer whose romantic, dramatic, poetic, critical, philosophical, political and moral work, as well as his correspondence (more than 23,000 known letters) are considerable.
Voltaire poet
Voltaire highly valued his verses and wanted to be a poet (note that in the 18th century, the concept of poet brought together both those who write poetry and those who are playwrights); he was moreover considered in his century as the successor of Corneille and Racine, sometimes even their triumphant; his plays were immensely successful, and the author enjoyed consecration in 1778 when, on the stage of the Comédie Française, La Clairon (a famous actress of the time; cf. Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le comedien) crowned his bust with laurels , in front of an enthusiastic audience.
We must not therefore play down the position in the literary field of the poet Voltaire in the 18th century; however, posterity judged otherwise.
His clumsiness has often been ridiculed:
“No, there is nothing that Nanine does not honor” (Nanine, III, 8)
... but also retained his many epigrams.
Excerpt from Les Fréron:
(...) The other day a fat ex-Jesuit,
In the attic of a house,
Met a very educated girl
With a beautiful little boy.
The goat seized the giton.
We discover him, he flees.
The whole neighborhood chasing him
Shouted:"Fréron, Fréron, Fréron"
When at the drama of Mr. Hume
Some rascal was flouted,
The floor, whose custom
Is to have the a fairly good nose,
Said aloud to himself:"I presume
That we wanted to paint Fréron.
Voltaire and the theater
The most unlikely thing about Voltaire's relationship with the theater is that he thought he would only be remembered for his plays, which were considered quite mediocre in comparison to his other writings. Nothing came of it and, among the sixty or so plays he wrote, history has remembered Zaire (1732), Adelaide du Guesclin (1734), Alzire or the Americans (1736), Mahomet or Fanaticism (1741). ), La Mérope française (1743), Sémiramis (1748), Nanine, ou le prejudice vanquished (1749), The Duc de Foix (1752), The Orphan of China (1755), Le Café ou l'Écossaise (1760 ), Tancred (1760), The Scythians (1767), or The Laws of Minos (1774).
Voltaire sometimes collaborated with Rameau for lyrical works:the most ambitious common project (the sacred opera Samson) ended up being abandoned without being performed, condemned by the censorship (1733-1736). There was then (1745) a comedy-ballet, La Princesse de Navarre and an opera-ballet, Le Temple de la Gloire at the time when Voltaire was still a courtier.
Nowadays fallen into almost general oblivion, Voltaire's plays have nevertheless been part of the theatrical repertoire for almost two centuries.
His moral
In the thought of the English philosopher John Locke, Voltaire finds a doctrine which adapts perfectly to his positive and utilitarian ideal. Locke appears as the defender of liberalism by affirming that the social pact does not suppress the natural rights of individuals. Besides, it is experience alone that instructs us; everything beyond it is only hypothesis; the field of the certain coincides with that of the useful and the verifiable. , to embellish his life by science, industry, the arts and by a good "police" of societies. Thus, living together would not be possible without an agreement where everyone benefits. Although expressed by laws particular to each country, justice, which ensures this convention, is universal. All men are capable of conceiving the idea, first because all are more or less reasonable beings, then because they are all capable of understanding that what is useful to society is useful to everyone. Virtue, "trade in benefits", is dictated to them both by feeling and by interest. The role of morality, according to Voltaire, is to teach us the principles of this “police” and to accustom us to respecting them.
Foreign to any religious spirit, Voltaire however refuses the atheism of Diderot or Holbach. He kept repeating his famous couplet:
The universe embarrasses me, and I cannot imagine
That this clock exists and has no watchmaker.
Thus, according to Voltaire, the order of the universe can make us believe in an “eternal geometer”. However, if he remained attached to deism, he denounced providentialism as derisory (in Candide for example) and posed again this question formulated as early as Saint Augustine and which he leaves unanswered:"Why does there exist so much evil, being formed by a God whom all theists have agreed to call good? .
This sentence is also attributed to him:"We can, if you wish, speak of the existence of God, but as I do not want to be robbed or have my throat cut in my sleep, let me first give leave to my servants”.
In any case, he fought against fanaticism, that of the Catholic Church as well as that of Protestantism, symbols in his eyes of intolerance and injustice. Tracts, pamphlets, everything was good for mobilizing European public opinion. He also bet on laughter to arouse indignation:humor and irony become weapons against the murderous madness that makes men unhappy. Voltaire's enemies had everything to fear from his mockery, but sometimes new ideas too. When in 1755 he received Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Speech on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Voltaire, who disapproved of the work, replied in a letter as skilful as it was ironic:
“I have received, sir, your new book against the human race, I thank you for it. [...] We have never used so much spirit to want to make ourselves stupid; he feels like crawling when someone reads your work. However, as it has been more than sixty years since I lost the habit of it, I unfortunately feel that it is impossible for me to resume it and I leave this natural pace to those who are more worthy of it than you and me. . [...]" (Letter to Rousseau, August 30, 1755)
The “patriarch of Ferney” eminently represents the militant humanism of the 18th century. As Sainte-Beuve wrote:“[...] as long as a breath of life animated him, he had within him what I call the good demon:indignation and ardour. Apostle of reason to the end, we can say that Voltaire died fighting. »
His correspondence includes more than 23,000 known letters while he leaves to posterity a gigantic Philosophical Dictionary which takes up the main axes of his work, around thirty philosophical tales and articles published in the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert. Nowadays, his theater, which had propelled him to the forefront of the literary scene (Mérope, Zaire and others), as well as his poetry (La Henriade, considered the only French epic in the 18th century) are forgotten.
It is to Voltaire, above all others, that applies what Condorcet said of the philosophers of the 18th century, that they had "as a battle cry:reason, tolerance, humanity".
Voltaire and fanaticism
All the work of Voltaire is a fight against fanaticism and intolerance, and this from La Henriade in 1723. smallpox." Philosophical Dictionary, 1764, article Fanaticism
Voltaire was passionate about several cases and struggled to ensure that justice was done.
* The Calas Affair (1762)
* The Sirven Affair (1764)
* The Chevalier de La Barre Affair (1766)
* The Lally-Tollendal Affair (1776)
This fight is illustrated by this famous and yet apocryphal quote:
"I don't agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for you to have the right to say it. »
According to certain commentators (Norbert Guterman, A Book of French Quotations, 1963), this quotation is based on a letter of February 6, 1770 to an Abbé Le Riche in which Voltaire would say:"Monsieur l'abbé, I hate what you write, but I will give my life so that you can continue to write. In fact, this letter exists but the sentence does not appear there, nor even the idea. (See the full text of this letter in the Tolerance article.)
On the other hand, this pseudo-quote has its source in the following passage:
"I loved the author of the book of the Spirit [Helvetius]. This man was better than all his enemies put together; but I never approved either of the errors of his book, nor of the trivial truths which he spouts with emphasis. I took his side loudly, when absurd men condemned him for these very truths." (Questions on the Encyclopedia, article "Man").
Voltaire, precursor of the Revenu citoyen
Voltaire's short story L'Homme aux forty écus starts from the measurement in arpents of the kingdom and the average rental value of the land per arpent. If this sum were distributed among all the subjects of the kingdom, that would give each an income of forty crowns, with which he provided his hero. This principle is exactly the one that is implicitly underlying the Citizen's Income, namely the inherent share of minimum pension that everyone can expect from the heritage built up by previous generations. It can help to survive, but only under very modest conditions.
Various aspects of Voltaire
Voltaire and money
Voltaire died at the head of an immense fortune:"one of the first incomes of France, they say!" (Jean Goldzink, Voltaire).
His income would come from:
* of his pen; in his Historical Commentary on the works of the author of the Henriade he evokes the success of this work published in Great Britain thanks to the protection of the king,
* from the pocket of the princes; according to the times:George I of Great Britain, Louis XV, Frederick II, Catherine II of Russia;
* the income of his peasants in Ferney,
* various investments:lottery, loans to the aristocracy, maritime investments:in 1758 ships loaded with gold from the Americas entered the port of Cadiz where he had invested part of his fortune;
*according to some, triangular trade[2].
He hardly broached the subject, and it is considered that he kept two things a secret:his affairs, and his love affair with his niece.
Voltaire and slavery
It has often been claimed that Voltaire enriched himself by having participated in the slave trade. In support of this thesis, a letter he allegedly wrote to a slave trader in Nantes to thank him for having made him earn 600,000 pounds in this way is invoked, but this letter is apocryphal. In reality, Voltaire strongly condemned slavery. The most famous text is the denunciation of the mutilations of the Suriname slave in Candide [3] but his corpus includes several other interesting passages. In the “Commentaire sur l’Esprit des lois” (1777), he congratulates Montesquieu for having cast opprobrium on this odious practice.
He also enthused about the freeing of their slaves by the Pennsylvania Quakers in 1769.
In the company of his lawyer and friend Christin, he fought during the last years of his life for the liberation of the "slaves" of the Jura who constituted the last serfs present in France and who, by virtue of the privilege of mortmain, were submitted to the monks of the chapter of Saint-Claude (Jura). It is one of the few political battles he has lost; the serfs were not freed until the French Revolution, from which Voltaire inspired some of the principles.
There are, however, other less humanistic quotes on slavery.
* Essays on the customs and spirit of nations (1756)
“We only buy domestic slaves from Negroes; we are blamed for this trade. A people who traffic in their children is even more reprehensible than the buyer. This trade demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one. .
Controversy over Voltaire's anti-Semitism
With regard to "anti-Semitism", Voltaire writes for example in the article "Tolerance" of the Philosophical Dictionary:"It is with regret that I speak of the Jews:this nation is, in many respects, the most detestable that ever defiled the earth." The historian Léon Poliakov, who entitled From Voltaire to Wagner the third volume of his History of Anti-Semitism, makes him "the worst French anti-Semite of the 18th century". In this book Poliakov ends up finding the link between the anti-Semitic writings of Voltaire and Nazi barbarism [ref. necessary]. According to him this feeling would have worsened in the last fifteen years of Voltaire's life. It would then seem linked to the fight of the philosopher against the Christian church. Financial problems and difficult relations with Jewish bankers are also put forward, which seems insufficiently founded [ref. necessary]. However, for Bernard Lazare, “if Voltaire was an ardent Judeophobe, the ideas that he and the encyclopedists represented were not hostile to the Jews, since they were ideas of freedom and universal equality. »
Others note that the existence of contradictory passages in the work of Voltaire does not make it possible to conclude conclusively with racism or anti-Semitism of the philosopher:thus Roland Desné writes:"It is not because certain sentences of Voltaire hurt us that we should confuse him in the peat of the persecutors”
According to Pierre-André Taguieff in his preface to the reissue of Poliakov's La Causalité diabolice, "The unconditional admirers of the 'philosophy of the Enlightenment', if they take the trouble to read the third volume ("From Voltaire to Wagner") of the History of Antisemitism, published in 1968, can only qualify their judgments on thinkers like Voltaire or Baron d'Holbach, who reformulated anti-Judaism in the "progressive" cultural code of the struggle against prejudices and superstitions".
Voltaire and the flood:an error of appreciation
The presence of marine fossils on the tops of the mountains was considered in his time as proof of their submersion and therefore of the flood. Voltaire did not accept this interpretation, nor even the idea that there could ever have been seabed where there were mountains. He laughed at the idea in the Philosophical Dictionary by showing surprise that no one had thought of a much simpler explanation according to him:that crusaders or pilgrims abandoned shells which they had brought as provisions for their journey .
In Voltaire's defense, we will not forget that ideas were still vague about the formation of mountains:we did not imagine that their rocks could have been at one time below sea level and c he Biblical Flood was credited with discovering sea shells in the high mountains. So he answered with an appearance of common sense that we didn't understand then why we didn't discover this kind of shells everywhere and he was looking for a reasonable explanation.
Anecdotes
* In 2000, Frédéric Lenormand published a novel, La Jeune fille et le philosophe, evoking the adoption by Voltaire of a descendant of the Corneille family. The anecdote is taken from Voltaire's account of it in his correspondence. Haunted by the shadow of Corneille, it seemed extraordinary to him to become the adoptive father of one of his descendants. It was to constitute a dowry for this young girl that he published a new edition of Corneille's plays, sold by subscription to all the princes of Europe. Note that the daughter of his ward was imprisoned in Paris during the Terror, like Belle and Bonne, and like the daughter-in-law of the beautiful Émilie, the Duchess of Châtelet, who was even guillotined.
* Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ardent promoter of the idea of the noosphere, has a sister of Voltaire as a grandmother.
* The altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan:
During an outing to a Parisian theater, Voltaire met the Chevalier de Rohan, a representative of one of the great families of the French nobility. Voltaire then said to him:"Sir, I am beginning my name while you are finishing yours".
The nobleman politely greets Voltaire.
A few days later, Voltaire is invited to lunch with the Chevalier de Rohan. Once his cab stopped inside the residence, the servants beat the young Arouet, then have him imprisoned.
* Voltaire was often described as a freemason without an apron, because he had kept away from this obedience although he had similar ideas. In the evening of his life, he nevertheless agreed to enter the lodge of the Nine Sisters (which Benjamin Franklin also frequented). Given his age, he was exempted from the usual hardships as well as the rite of removing the blindfold, which seemed out of place on a man who had been considered by many to be one of the most clairvoyant of his time. On this unique occasion, he put on the apron of Claude-Adrien Helvétius, whom he kissed with respect.
* Voltaire said about Marivaux and others:“Great composers of nothing, gravely weighing fly eggs in scales made of cobwebs”.
* La Henriade was inspired by his mistress, the Maréchale de Villars. After their breakup, Voltaire sent him this madrigal:
“When you loved me, my verses were kind,
I sang with dignity of your graces, your virtues:
This work was born in these favorable times;
It would have been perfect; but you no longer love me”.
(François-Antoine Chevrier, Almanach des gens d'esprit, London, Jean Nourse, 1762, p. 110)
Works
* Oedipus, 1718
* The Henriade, 1728
* History of Charles XII, 1730
* Brutus, 1730
* Zaire, 1732
* The Temple of Taste, 1733
* English Letters or Philosophical Letters, 1734
* Adelaide du Guesclin, 1734
* Muhammad, 1736
* Socialite, 1736
* Epistle on Newton, 1736
* Treatise on Metaphysics, 1736
* The Prodigal Son, 1736
* Essay on the nature of fire, 1738
* Elements of Newton's Philosophy, 1738
* Zulime, 1740
* Fanaticism or Muhammad the Prophet, 1741
* Merope, 1743
* Zadig (or Destiny), 1748
* The world as it goes, 1748
* Nanine, or the Vanquished Péjugé, 1749
* The Century of Louis XIV, 1751
* Micromegas, 1752
* Poem on the Lisbon disaster, 1756
* Essay on the manners and spirit of Nations, 1756
*History of Scarmentado's travels written by himself, 1756
* Candide or Optimism, 1759
* Tancred, 1760
* The Story of a Good Bramin, 1761
* The Maid of Orleans, 1762
* Treatise on Tolerance, 1763
* What pleases the ladies, 1764
* Portable Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
* Jeannot and Colin, 1764
* Of the horrible danger of reading, 1765
* Small digression, 1766
* The Ignorant Philosopher, 1766
* The Ingenuous, 1767
* The Princess of Babylon, 1768
* Questions about the Encyclopedia, 1770
* The Letters of Memmius, 1771
* We must take a side, 1772
* The Cry of Innocent Blood, 1775
* Of the Soul, 1776
* Dialogues of Euhémère, 1777
* Correspondence with Vauvenargues, established in 2006