His departure for London was precipitated when he unwisely became involved in a humiliating argument with an aristocrat, who had him briefly interned in the Bastille. Voltaire arrived in London in the autumn of , and what had begun partly as self-imposed exile became a crucially formative period for him. In truth, he was a philosopher before coming to England, and it would be more accurate to say that Voltaire came to England a poet and left it a prose writer.
Voltaire thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and during his long life he would never abandon the writing of verse, for which he had a remarkable facility many of his letters are sprinkled with seemingly spontaneous passages of verse. It is hardly coincidental, therefore, that before returning to France in , Voltaire began writing his first two major essays in prose: a history, the Histoire de Charles XII , and a book about the English, which is now best known under the title Lettres philosophiques , but was first published in English translation London as the Letters Concerning the English Nation.
He had turned fifty and was now the leading poet and dramatist of his day; perhaps even Voltaire did not imagine that the works which would make him even more celebrated still lay in the future. Throughout his career, however, Voltaire was prone to involvement in literary quarrels, and his time in Berlin was no exception; his attack on Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy, caused Frederick II to lose patience with him.
They corresponded on literary and philosophical matters, and Voltaire sent Frederick many of his works in manuscript. Their exchange of more than seven hundred letters remains as an extraordinary literary achievement in its own right.
The Lisbon earthquake of November may have disturbed his philosophical certainties and caused him to doubt the Leibnizian Optimism which Alexander Pope had helped to popularize, but it did not disturb his new-found personal happiness. His prose response to the catastrophe, in Candide , took longer to mature and was published in He began a fifteen year relationship with the Marquise, both as lovers and as collaborators in their intellectual pursuits, during which they collected and studied over 21, books and performed experiments in the natural sciences in a laboratory.
He continued to write, often in collaboration with the Marquise, both fiction and scientific and historical treatises, as well as on more philosophical subjects especially Metaphysics , the justification for the existence of God and the validity of the Bible. He renounced religion , and called for the separation of church and state and for more religious freedom.
Nevertheless, he was voted into the Academie Francaise in After the death of the Marquise in and continuing disputes over his work "Zadig" of , Voltaire moved to Potsdam near Berlin to join Frederick the Great - , a great friend and admirer of his, with a salary of 20, francs a year.
After a promising start, Voltaire attracted more controversy in with his attack on the president of the Berlin Academy of Science , which greatly angered Frederick. Once again, documents were burned and he fled toward Paris to avoid arrest, but Louis XV had banned him from returning to Paris, so instead he turned to Geneva , Switzerland, where he bought a large estate. Although he was welcomed at first, the law in Geneva banned theatrical performances and the publication of his works and Voltaire eventually left the city in despair.
In , he finally settled at an estate called Ferney , close to the Swiss border, where he lived most of his last 20 years until just before his death, and where he continued to receive all the intellectual elite of his time. His frustrating experiences of recent years inspired his best-known work, "Candide, ou l'Optimisme" "Candide, or Optimism" of , a satire on the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and on religious and philosophical optimism in general.
Voltaire returned to a hero's welcome in Paris in , at the age of However, the excitement of the trip was too much for him and he died on 30 May in Paris. His last words are said to have been, "For God's sake, let me die in peace". His heart was removed from his body and now lies in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and his brain was also removed although, after a series of passings-on over years, it apparently disappeared after an auction.
There is great debate on whether Voltaire was making an actual statement about embracing a pessimistic philosophy or if he was trying to encourage people to be actively involved to improve society.
In , he published another of his acclaimed philosophical works, Dictionnaire philosophique , an encyclopedic dictionary that embraced the concepts of Enlightenment and rejected the ideas of the Roman Catholic Church. In , Voltaire was exiled to Tulle for mocking the duc d'Orleans.
In , he returned to Paris, only to be arrested and exiled to the Bastille for a year on charges of writing libelous poetry. Voltaire was sent to the Bastille again in , for arguing with the Chevalier de Rohan.
This time he was only detained briefly before being exiled to England, where he remained for nearly three years. The publication of Voltaire's Letters on the English angered the French church and government, forcing the writer to flee to safer pastures. Voltaire moved to Prussia in as a member of Frederick the Great's court, and spent later years in Geneva and Ferney. By , he was recognized as an icon of the Enlightenment's progressive ideals, and he was given a hero's welcome upon his return to Paris.
He died there shortly afterward, on May 30, For years Toulouse had celebrated the massacre of 4, of its Huguenot inhabitants. When the rumor spread that the deceased had been about to renounce Protestantism, the family was seized and tried for murder.
The father was broken on the rack while protesting his innocence. A son was exiled, the daughters were confined in a convent, and the mother was left destitute. Investigation assured Voltaire of their innocence, and from to he worked unceasingly in their behalf. He employed "his friends, his purse, his pen, his credit" to move public opinion to the support of the Calas family. Voltaire's ingenuity and zeal against injustice were not exhausted by the Calas affair.
Similar was his activity in behalf of the Sirven family and of the victims of the Abbeville judges John Morley, English secretary for lreland under William Gladstone, wrote of Voltaire's stature: "When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men's minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive moments in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning, or the Reformation. But the sauce must be varied to please the public palate. Voltaire was a master chef, a superb saucier.
Voltaire was more than a thinker and activist. Style was nearly always nearly all to him-in his abode, in his dress, and particularly in his writings.
As poet and man of letters, he was demanding, innovative, and fastidious within regulated patterns of expression. Even as thinker and activist, he believed that form was all-or at least the best part. As he remarked, "Never will twenty folio volumes bring about a revolution. Little books are the ones to fear, the pocket-size, portable ones that sell for thirty sous. If the Gospels had cost sesterces, the Christian religion could never have been established.
Voltaire's literary focus moved from that of poet to pamphleteer, and his moral sense had as striking a development. In youth a shameless libertine and in middle years a man notorious throughout the literary world, with more discreet but still eccentric attachments-in his later years Voltaire was renowned, whatever his personal habits, as a public defender and as a champion of human liberty.
Voltaire's life nearly spanned the 18th century; his writings fill 70 volumes; and his influence is not yet exhausted. He once wrote: "They wanted to bury me. But I outwitted them. John Morley's Voltaire also remains a readable and stimulating appreciation.
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