Early modern Europe · 1694–1778
Voltaire
French writer who campaigned against intolerance and fanaticism
He popularised Locke and Newton in France and mocked Leibnizian optimism in Candide. His campaign for the executed Protestant Jean Calas made religious toleration a public cause.
Life and thought
François-Marie Arouet, who wrote as Voltaire, was the son of a Paris notary and was educated by the Jesuits. His sharp tongue twice landed him in the Bastille, and in 1726 he left for some two and a half years in England, where he came to admire Newton, Locke and English religious toleration. He wrote plays, poems, histories and philosophical tales, and from 1759 lived at Ferney near the Swiss border as the most famous writer in Europe.
Voltaire was less a builder of systems than a campaigner. His Letters on the English (1733) used English liberty and science to shame French absolutism and was burned by order of the Paris parlement. Candide (1759), written after the Lisbon earthquake, mocks the optimism that this is the best of all possible worlds and ends with the advice to cultivate our garden. From 1762 he fought to clear the name of Jean Calas, a Protestant executed on a false charge of murdering his son, and his Treatise on Tolerance argued that persecution is irrational and cruel. “Écrasez l’infâme” — crush the infamous thing, meaning fanaticism and the abuses of the Church — was his rallying cry.