Titans of History

VOLTAIRE

1694–1778

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.

Voltaire

The writer, philosopher, literary celebrity and friend of kings, François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was the star of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the most influential men in Europe—and also one of the richest. His ridicule of the absurdities and atrocities of 18th-century Europe helped to give birth to the modern world—a world in which science and reason replaced superstition. Thanks to his indignation and energy, freedom of speech and of belief, and the even-handed administration of justice, came to be regarded as inalienable human rights.

Voltaire was famed even in his own time as a tireless multi-talented genius. He excelled as a playwright, a poet, a novelist, a satirist, a polemicist, a historian, a philosopher, a financial investor and a (sometimes sycophantic) courtier. Of his prodigious output of over 350 works, it is the slim satire Candide (1759) that most completely encapsulates his brilliance. Published, like most of Voltaire’s work, to instant popular acclaim, it follows the hapless eponymous hero through a series of grim adventures as he clings to the conventional religio-philosophical piety that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”—despite increasingly conclusive evidence, as horror piles on horror, to the contrary. A devastatingly witty attack on everything from slavery to the professions, Candide exemplifies the power of Voltaire’s razor-sharp pen to deflate pretension and hypocrisy.

Wiry, mischievous and wickedly brilliant, Voltaire was the changeling in an otherwise entirely conventional wealthy bourgeois family. He personally encouraged the rumors that his paternity lay elsewhere. By his late teens his acid wit—he once remarked of a rival poet’s “Ode to Posterity” that “I fear it will not reach its mark”—had made him the pet of aristocratic society. Voltaire, the financial wizard, made a fortune from canny manipulation of the Paris lottery. Cirey, the Lorraine estate on which Voltaire spent ten years with his great love, the married and beautiful mathematics scholar the Marquise de Châtelet in the 1730s and 1740s, became a hothouse of intellectual debate and social mischief.

Voltaire’s campaign against the monarchy’s arbitrary practices was informed by firsthand experience: as a youth, his satirical pen had briefly landed him in the Bastille. A subsequent exile in London (1726–9) alerted Voltaire to the contrast between England’s intellectual openness and the oppressive censorship of France. In his Philosophical Letters, published on his return to France in 1729, Voltaire embarked on a lifelong attack on the injustice and intolerance fostered by the Catholic Church and France’s absolute monarchy. Thereafter, Voltaire and the French authorities existed in an uneasy truce. He briefly held a court appointment as royal historiographer in the 1740s, although his rooms—“the most stinking shit hole in Versailles”—disappointed him. But having come to the conclusion that “I am very fond of the truth, but not at all of martyrdom,” he spent most of his life away from the center.

He based himself at Geneva from 1755, then, in 1759, settled at nearby Ferney in French territory, whose proximity to the Swiss border afforded him luxurious safety to exercise his pen. The pseudonyms he used were flimsy to say the least: he favored the Archbishop of Paris for his most virulent attacks on the church. But they allowed him to disavow authorship, with wide-eyed innocence, while the outraged authorities banned and burned his books.

Voltaire’s outstanding achievement was his campaign for civil rights, waged under his motto “Écrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the infamy”). His calls for religious freedom and judicial fairness ushered in a new era. Leg braces, thumbscrews, the rack, sleep deprivation, pouring water on rags stuffed into the victim’s throat to induce the sensation of drowning, hanging a victim by their arms with weights attached to their ankles—these were just some of the methods used in prisons across Europe in Voltaire’s time to extract confessions from the “guilty.”

Punishment could be still more gruesome. The execution in Paris, in 1757, of Robert Damiens, the man who tried to stab Louis XV, was incomparably grisly. First of all, as decreed by France’s Parlement, the hand that had wielded the knife was burned. The executioner then used pincers to tear away chunks of flesh, filling the wounds with molten lead. For over quarter of an hour, four horses, pulling in different directions, tried to dismember Damiens’ broken body until finally his thighs and arms were severed with a knife. It was said that the would-be regicide was still just alive when his dismembered trunk was thrown on the fire.

Until the 18th century, torture was an accepted part of the judicial system. It was a means of wrenching the truth from the recalcitrant human will, a way of punishing the guilty in the most heinous way possible. The thinkers of the Enlightenment saw it otherwise—as a barbaric practice that had nothing to do with justice, one that risked punishing the innocent as well as the guilty.

Inflicting such intense pain on a man, argued the Italian Cesare Beccaria in 1764, in one of the age’s most influential tracts, would only compel the victim to “accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent.” Hearing of the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot (French Protestant) from Toulouse who in 1762 was accused of murdering his son, then tortured to obtain a confession and finally broken on the wheel, Voltaire raged against the superstitious barbarism of the Catholic Church and its excessive judicial influence.

During the latter half of the 18th century, Prussia, Sweden, France, Austria and Tuscany all abolished judicial torture. In 1801, under Tsar Paul, Russia decreed that “the very name of torture, bringing shame and reproach on mankind, should be forever erased from the public memory.”

It was far from a distant memory; but now torture was a shameful secret rather than a commendable practice. And while the bloodbath of France’s Terror has totally sullied its name, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s invention for swiftly and painlessly beheading the condemned was meant to be a step away from the savage methods of the past. The deist Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763) expanded on his belief that reason should be government’s abiding principle, and his assertion that religious freedom was not harmful to the state’s well-being has become a fundamental principle of modern government. “The right to persecute,” he declared, “is absurd and barbaric.”

By now Voltaire’s fame had spread across Europe: Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, with whom he enjoyed a prolific correspondence, basked in his reflected glory, projecting themselves as adherents of “enlightened absolutism.” Both repeatedly invited him to visit and he duly stayed with Frederick (1750–53), but the realities of the Prussian court soured Voltaire’s rapport with the man he now described as a “likable whore,” and who once described him as a “monkey.” He resisted Catherine’s invitations, but it was he who flattered her by dubbing her “the Great.” Luminaries from across the continent flocked to see Voltaire, and at Ferney he became the self-described “innkeeper of Europe.” The brilliant schoolboy, described by his father-confessor as being “devoured by a thirst for celebrity,” had become “King Voltaire,” revered and reviled in equal measure across Europe as the scourge of authority, injustice and hypocrisy. As he lay dying in Paris in 1778, his rooms were crammed with crowds of people, all determined to catch a last glimpse of a legendary man.

The shrine to Voltaire erected by the French revolutionaries in the Panthéon acknowledges their debt to him. It bears the inscription: “He taught us how to be free.” Voltaire had begun the process of translating the ideals of the Enlightenment into reality, and his words became the first bomb thrown against the ancien régime. He once told a friend, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”