Voltaire, Or A Disruptive Thinker

Síofra Pierse is the Head of the School of Languages Cultures and Linguistics at UCD Dublin, where she lectures in French and Francophone Studies. During her DPhil studies at Trinity College Oxford, she specialised in 18^th-century French historiography and history of ideas. Her latest book is Voltaire: A Reference Guide to his Life and Works (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD).

Those who knew me back in Oxford will be familiar with the name “Voltaire”, mainly because my DPhil was on Voltaire’s historiography and I was rather voluble back then about the French philosopher’s significant impact on modernity. As a postgraduate, the Rhodes-Voltaire-Oxford combination was the perfect trio for me, given that the world centre of Voltaire Studies is at the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. Voltaire was such a pivotal figure in 18^th-century Europe that he continues to pop up everywhere. Like Voltaire, I spent three truly seminal years of my life in England, but I admit that the identification stops there! 

Before Covid struck, I was invited by US publishers Rowman and Littlefield to write a reference guide to the life and works of French 18^th-century philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), which would be part of a series on “Significant Figures in World History”. Undoubtedly, Voltaire was a particularly significant figure in his day and has remained a critical voice ever since. Most notably, throughout his long and prolific life he was an inconvenience and a thorn in the side of authority, whether church, judiciary, or crown.

One of the things that stands out about Voltaire is the uniqueness of his life performance. Even his name is a total construct. He was born François-Marie Arouet, but quickly adopted the penname Voltaire. He liked to style himself as an aristocrat named M. de Voltaire. When he died in 1778, he was whisked out of Paris propped up in a carriage wearing a powdered wig so that his nephew could bury him in church grounds, since most church figures abhorred him. His first grave in Sellières was marked XX, with the intertwined initials A and V capturing Arouet crossed with Voltaire. His brain went to the Comédie-Française theatre and his heart was secreted within a seated statue of the philosopher by French sculptor Houdon. Later, in 1791, Voltaire’s remains were twice exhumed and he was finally interred by the Revolutionaries with massive state funeral pomp and ceremony at the Panthéon in Paris, where his grave may be visited today.

My students love Voltaire's rebelliousness and his spontaneity. In 1729-30, Voltaire teamed up with a syndicate led by brilliant mathematician, Charles Marie de la Condamine, to cheat the French national lottery. A flaw in the lottery design meant that a ticket priced at one “livre” (pound) had the same chance as a ticket costing many multiples of that. The syndicate bought up thousands and thousands of small value tickets and started to win huge sums of money. By the time the royal council realised what was happening and swooped in to shut down the lottery permanently, Voltaire had pocketed over a half a million “livres”. This gave the writer the rare gift of independent financial stability for life. Roger Pearson tells this anecdote very convincingly in his wonderful biography, Voltaire Almighty (2005). That financial detail was pivotal as it impacted directly on the future of Europe. With his financial independence, Voltaire could be as critical, audacious and outrageous as he liked in an era of strict censorship. 

One of the remarkable aspects of Voltaire’s activism is his deliberate discommoding of police, society, church, and court. Even now, three centuries after his 1694 birth, he continues to incite outrage and reaction. His anticlericalism and provocative personality and writings still annoy and offend people who have never read a word of his vast publications. While he was alive, he goaded church, judiciary, and court to question, review and renew their procedures and their values. Voltaire’s key discourses on justice, social progress and freedom in the age of Enlightenment still impact today. For example, in 2015 when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance/ Treaty on Tolerance which defends freedom of speech was immediately cited. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of Voltaire, proclaiming: “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie). However much he disagreed with someone, Voltaire was the first to defend his enemies’ right to freedom of expression. Similarly, Voltaire devoted the last two decades of his life to a series of high-profile campaigns to defend or rehabilitate victims of miscarriages of justice. He convinced a rich network of monarchs across Europe to support his campaigns and managed to have flagrant miscarriages of justice overturned and to have innocent victims pardoned. Many of those original flawed sentences were inspired by religious fanaticism, and Voltaire was determined to expose blinkered, sectarian, or fanatical thinking.

A less-public element sustaining Voltaire was his constant reliance on women throughout his life: the British socialite and aristocrat Nancy Mitford’s Voltaire in Love (1957) may read nowadays as a work from a certain era, yet Mitford’s narrative perfectly captures the philosopher’s deep-seated admiration of, and serial dependence on, a sequence of women. From early girlfriend Pimpette through various lovers who were brilliant, vibrant women (including actresses and salonnières), via the brilliant physicist the Marquise Émilie Du Châtelet, to his niece and final lover and companion into old age Madame Denis, Voltaire appears to have been consistently mollycoddled by female companions. Modern psychologists will have a term for this state. While Voltaire never married, he consistently inspired life-long loyalty in all of his friends. A striking example occurs at the moment in 1749 when his adored lover, the physicist Émilie Du Châtelet, lay dying of puerperal fever after childbirth. Her tragic deathbed was attended by her beloved Voltaire, by her most recent lover the marquis de Saint-Lambert also father of her child, and by her own husband, the affable Marquis Du Châtelet. Of the trio, Voltaire depicts himself as the most distraught of all after the death of the woman whom he considered an equal partner and scientific genius.

Central to Voltaire’s thinking and writing is his innate optimism. Although this may be linked to the period’s prevailing Enlightenment zeitgeist, his contemporaries Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Denis Diderot do not share such a light touch. It is apposite that the tale which remains Voltaire’s most well-known piece of writing, Candide (still studied in French schools even today), is a satire on Leibnizian Optimism, or a system wherein everything is as good as it could be (given the circumstances). In the merciless style of Jonathan Swift -whom he admired- Voltaire satirises the Leibnizian system, showing how Candide believes everything is just fabulous, even as he travels around the world encountering sequences of shocking man-made horrors and natural disasters. When Candide gets caught up in the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake/ tsunami/ conflagration triptych, he emerges relatively unscathed against a bleak backdrop of Inquisition and religious fanaticism. Later in the text, Candide encounters a slave who has lost a hand, because his finger got trapped in the mill, and also a leg, because he attempted to run away. The text’s stark condemnation of European-led slavery, driven by economic greed, had an impact on tens of thousands of contemporary readers of Candide across Europe. The anti-slavery trope travelled across cultures, across borders, and across languages. Candide is a text that helped bring about the end of slavery.

Yet, during Black Lives Matter in 2020, Voltaire’s statue in Paris was daubed in red paint, identifying him as someone who had the blood of colonial trade in slavery on his hands. Voltaire’s life investments were always very profitable, but were any of them in slave plantations or slavery? While no specific direct evidence exists, the philosopher was familiar with the Pâris brothers, some of whom were involved in the slave trade. Given Voltaire’s writings against slavery and the impact of Candide in having slavery abolished, such a conundrum remains deeply problematic.

Voltaire wrote millions of words in his long life. For someone who had wished to be a successful playwright, he ended up devoting more of his incredible energy to activism and pan-European campaigns against injustice, religious intolerance, fanaticism and sectarianism. He was provocative and outspoken, but also sensitive to criticism of his own writings. He was successful, but at an immense price, because he was forced to spend most of his adult life in exile outside his native France. He was beloved and hated, trusted and feared, admired and despised, sought out and banished. While he was a provocative and divisive figure, he relished stardom and would savour his continuing fame today. Yet, the activist Voltaire would be deeply disappointed to see just how significant and relevant his 18^th-century discourses on tolerance remain three long centuries later.