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1. VOLTAIRE (FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET) 1694-1778 Imagine a writer so...
VOLTAIRE
(FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET)
1694-1778
Imagine a writer so outspoken and so fearless that although his work landed him in prison
and in exile—more than once—he never stopped writing defiantly. If he could not publish
his work openly, he would have it printed secretly and smuggled across borders. If he could
not circulate it by the post, he would have it hand-carried in suitcases and distributed by
trusted friends. He seized freedom of speech even when it was not granted to him, and he
used it to mock corrupt priests and self-regarding kings. The sheer gutsiness of Voltaire is
breathtaking. In an atmosphere of stern censorship and absolute power, he managed to live
to the ripe age of eighty-three, writing lively denunciations of dominant orthodoxies and
powerful authorities almost every day. And his darkly comic imagination propelled him to
enormous fame. He was so successful that he grew richer than many kings in Europe. His
witty, light prose, and his clear and accessible style allowed him to popularize many of the
revolutionary goals of the Enlightenment—human rights, the value of freedom and
tolerance, the hope for progress through reasoned debate, and the urgent desire to end
human suffering where we can. It is in no small part thanks to Voltaire that these ideals
shape our own political landscape today.
LIFE AND TIMES
Bold, witty, and rebellious, François-Marie Arouet was a trouble to his parents as a child and
became a trouble to the authorities for the rest of his life. He was born near Paris in 1694 to
a middle-class family. At the age of ten he went to a boarding school run by Jesuits, where he
developed an enthusiasm for literature and a passionate opposition to organized religion.
His father wanted him to pursue a career in law, but he soon gave it up to write poetry and
plays. So sparkling and brilliant was his conversation that he won powerful friends, but his
propensity for satire also brought him enemies, and an attack on the acting head of state got
him locked in the Bastille prison in Paris for almost a year. While there, he committed
himself to writing, and his first play, Oedipus, turned into a huge success, bringing him
considerable wealth and establishing his reputation.
The young writer, who was now known by his pen name, "Voltaire," spent three years in
exile in England after a quarrel with a French nobleman. There he met the writers Jonathan
Swift and Alexander Pope. He enjoyed the freedom from censorship and punishment
allowed to writers in England, and returned to France with an even stronger sense of his

2. right to dissent and oppose authority. His many subversive writings, called by the
authorities "most dangerous to religion and civil order," earned him another spell of exile
from Paris, which he spent with his longtime mistress and intellectual companion Madame
du Châtelet. In 1750, Voltaire moved to Potsdam, in Prussia, where he joined the court of
the young King Frederick, later to be known as Frederick the Great, who loved the arts and
wanted philosophy and literature to flourish. Voltaire, like many other Enlightenment
thinkers, did not see democracy as the best form of government. The masses seemed to him
to impede reason, freedom, and progress (he said he would "rather obey one lion than 200
rats"). The regime he idealized was the enlightened despot—a sensitive, rational king who
welcomed dissent and sought the counsel of philosophers like himself. Early on, Frederick
promised to live up to that ideal, but Voltaire was soon to be disappointed. He and Frederick
argued; Frederick waged violent warfare and asserted power high-handedly. Voltaire was
invited to leave.
He took up residence for the rest of his life at Ferney, a town on the border between France
and Switzerland, so that he could escape from France easily if necessary. It was here that he
wrote the best-selling Candide—and a great deal more. Travelers and visitors brought
suitcases filled with Voltaire's "scandal-sheets" back with them to Paris where the public
eagerly gobbled them up. He repeatedly attacked religious extremism and stultifying
tradition and argued for universal human rights. And he refused the traditional literary goal
of immortality, casting his writing as a response to current debates and events.
Voltaire was no atheist (he once said that "if God did not exist it would be necessary to
invent him"). His own religion is usually known as Deism; that is, faith in a God who created
the world and then stands back, allowing nature to follow its own laws and never
intervening. The Deists' signature metaphor was God as a watchmaker: the world he made
was a mechanism, which then ticked away on its own. As far as human beings were
concerned, God gave them reason, and then left them free to use it. Deists disagreed about
whether God had instilled human beings with a love of virtue, and whether there was an
afterlife of rewards and punishments. Voltaire claimed that it was impossible for humans to
know anything beyond their senses—so God's will must remain mysterious—and he
believed that humans should use their senses and their reason to understand how the world
works and, to the best of our ability, to make it better.
By the time of Voltaire's death, he had become a national hero. In all, he had produced
enough work to fill 135 volumes, in a range of genres including tragedy, epic, philosophy,
history, fiction, and journalism. In death as in life, he continued to generate scandal and
division. Clergy in Paris refused to let him be buried in hallowed ground, so friends
smuggled his body out of the city—propping it up on the journey like a sleeping
passenger—and brought it to a monastery to be laid to rest. Later, leaders of the French
Revolution, who had been inspired by Voltaire's attacks on authority and religion, had his
body exhumed and reburied in Paris to huge national fanfare.
WORK
Voltaire wrote Candide in part as a response to a piece of news that shook him, and many of
his contemporaries, badly. On November 1, 1755, a devastating earthquake hit Lisbon, in
Portugal. Upwards of thirty thousand people died. Voltaire, writing almost obsessively

3. about this tragedy in his letters, wondered how anyone could make a case for an optimistic
philosophy in light of it. He worried over Alexander Pope's assertion in his Essay on Man
that "Whatever is, is right." Could anyone really believe that this was God's will—that a just
and rational God had created this world and that it was, in the words of the German
philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "the best of all possible worlds"? Voltaire's absurd
philosopher Pangloss ("all-tongue") is a caricature of Leibniz.
Though philosophical, Candide is so brief and so easy to read that it was immediately
popular with a wide range of readers. Voltaire deliberately opted for short, cheap, excitingly
readable texts. Long works "will never make a revolution," he argued, and wrote that "if the
New Testament had cost 4,200 sesterces, the Christian religion would never have taken
root." Thus Candide's brevity may be seen as part of its power.
It is also deliberately entertaining. Voltaire combines a lively appetite for humor with a
horrifying sense of the real existence of evil. The exuberance and extravagance of the
sufferings characters undergo may even prompt us to laugh: the plight of the old woman
whose buttock has been cut off to make rump steak for her starving companions, the
weeping of two girls whose monkey-lovers have been killed, the glum circumstances of six
exiled, poverty-stricken kings. But Voltaire also manages to keep his readers off balance.
Raped, cut to pieces, hanged, stabbed in the belly, the central characters of Candide keep
coming back to life at opportune moments, as though no disaster could have permanent
effects. Such reassuring fantasy at first suggests that it is all a joke, designed to ridicule an
outmoded philosophical system. And yet, reality keeps intruding. An admiral really did face
a firing squad and die for failing to engage an enemy ferociously enough. Those six hungry
kings were actual historical figures who were dispossessed. The Lisbon earthquake was so
real that it haunted Voltaire for years. And his satirical pen attacks genuine social problems
as various as military discipline, class hierarchy, greed, religious extremism, slavery, and
even the publishing industry. The extravagances of the story are therefore uncomfortably
matched by the extravagances of real life, and despite the comic lightness of the telling,
Voltaire demands that the reader confront these horrors.
The fantastic and exaggerated nature of the events stands out against the simplicity of the
narrative style. Candide is a naive traveler, like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, who does not
grasp the ironies he witnesses. He travels widely, taking in Europe, South America, and the
Ottoman Empire, where Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims all emerge as cruel and
hypocritical. The only exception is the mythical Eldorado, which takes place almost exactly
at the half-way point of the text, where corruption, crime, malice, and poverty do not exist.
Candide nonetheless insists on leaving Eldorado to find his beloved Cunégonde. Readers
have often wondered about the role of this paradise in an otherwise bleak picture of human
experience: does Eldorado suggest that human beings are capable of virtue, and if so, then
why does Voltaire compel his protagonist to leave? Is it too stagnant, too isolated, too dull?
Is it like the Garden of Eden, a paradise no longer home to fallen humanity? The fact that
Candide admires Milton's Paradise Lost and that the novella concludes with the protagonist
cultivating a garden suggests that Voltaire may have been rethinking the story of Adam and
Eve in his own imaginative way.
Candide encapsulated the many problems that stoked Voltaire's anger and fed his satire:

4. absolutism and religious bigotry, unnecessary bloodshed, restrictions on freedom of speech
and religion, and the intolerable reality of human suffering. This story has always been the
most famous work of its author's incalculably influential career. Voltaire inspired leaders of
the American Revolution—Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin—and
helped to shape the United States Constitution. The French Revolutionaries held Voltaire up
as a hero, as did generations fighting against religious intolerance. He was hotly reviled by
those who wanted to maintain the authority of established churches, and some went so far
as to call him the Antichrist. But in the centuries that have followed, Voltaire's ideas have
become part of the common fabric of our ideals.
Questions:
VOLTAIRE (François-Marie Arouet) 1694-1778
1. How do you see Voltaire's importance? What stands out the most for you?
2. Why did he spend three years in exile in England? How did this period influence his life?
3. How did he understand democracy? Who was an ideal ruler for him?
4. Where did he eventually settle? Why?
5. How did he perceive God?
6. Why did Voltaire write Candide?
7. Why was it so popular immediately?
8. Which leaders of the American Revolution did he inspire?
9. Do you admire Voltaire? Explain. Would you recommend reading Candide?