Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694, the son of a moderately successful notary who wanted him to study law. He preferred verse. By his early twenties he was circulating satirical poems against the Regent, the Duc d'Orléans, for which he was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven months in 1717 — time he used to finish his first tragedy, Œdipe, and to choose the pen name Voltaire. He emerged in 1718 as a successful playwright and the most quotable man in Paris, a position he never afterwards relinquished.

In 1726 a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot — Voltaire had answered an insult too cleverly, Rohan had him beaten by his footmen, and the legal system declined to interest itself in the grievances of a bourgeois poet against a nobleman — ended with Voltaire briefly back in the Bastille and then exiled to England. He spent nearly three years in London, attended Newton's funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1727, read Locke, and observed Quakers, Anglicans, and Presbyterians coexisting under a constitutional monarchy that did not burn anyone for theology. The Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), in which he reported these discoveries back to France, was burned in Paris by the public hangman; it is one of the founding documents of the French Enlightenment.

For most of the 1730s and 1740s he lived at Cirey in Champagne with Émilie du Châtelet, the mathematician and physicist who translated Newton's Principia into French; their fifteen-year partnership ended only with her death in childbirth in 1749. He spent three uncomfortable years at the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, quarrelled with the king, and in 1755 settled at Ferney just inside the French border with Geneva, where he could escape to Swiss territory if French authorities moved against him. He stayed for the next twenty-three years, running the estate as a small enlightened principality and corresponding with what felt like the entire reading population of Europe.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands on All Saints' Day, broke his patience with the Leibnizian philosophy that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) follows its naïve hero through earthquake, war, the Inquisition, and slavery in Surinam while the philosopher Pangloss continues to insist on universal harmony; the book is short, brutal, and very funny. From Ferney Voltaire conducted his late campaigns against judicial cruelty — most famously for the Protestant Jean Calas, broken on the wheel in Toulouse in 1762 on a false charge of murdering his own son to prevent a conversion to Catholicism. Voltaire spent three years getting the verdict overturned and Calas posthumously rehabilitated; the Treatise on Tolerance (1763) came directly out of the case. His signature exhortation to his correspondents, écrasez l'infâme — crush the infamous thing — meant religious fanaticism and the institutions that protected it.

He returned to Paris in February 1778 after twenty-eight years away, was mobbed in the streets, attended a triumphant performance of his late tragedy Irène, and died three months later at eighty-three. The Church refused him Christian burial; his body was smuggled out of Paris by friends. In 1791 the Revolution brought him back and installed him in the Panthéon.