INTRODUCTION
V
oltaire would probably have been both pleasantly surprised as well as bemused by the exceptional and enduring popularity of
Candide
, which he viewed as one of his minor works, unworthy to vie with his tragedies, historical essays, and epic and philosophical poems, on which he staked his posthumous reputation.
On November 21, 1694, on the left bank of the Seine, in the heart of Paris, a sickly infant named François-Marie Arouet was born and not expected to live. Contrary to this inauspicious beginning, he would fool everyone (something he later excelled at doing) and take his final leave of life only in his eighty-fourth year. By then he had become the most illustrious author of his age under his chosen pen name of Voltaire; this name he adorned with the article
de
, a common practice among writers of bourgeois origin with aristocratic aspirations, before and even after the French Revolution, as Beaumarchais and Balzac could attest.
The father of young Arouet, François Arouet, was an ambitious and highly respected lawyer whose ancestors had been merchant drapers and who in 1683 had married Marie-Marguerite d’Aumard (also spelled Daumard), a member of the minor provincial mobility. Unlike Rousseau or Diderot, Voltaire evidenced no sentimental attachment to his family and little curiosity about his roots, childhood, and early formative years. If he took little interest in his ancestry, it was probably because he deemed it of no special historical or cultural significance. As for his immediate family members, he barely knew his mother, who died when he was ten, and he never seemed to have felt a nostalgic urge to romanticize her; and he did not get along with his strict, quick-tempered father, who in turn would strongly disapprove of his son’s iconoclastic writings and highly controversial reputation. Voltaire was the least introspective of authors and still adhered to the classical notion that public self-revelation is not only in bad taste, it smacks of the obscene; in Pascal’s words, “the self is hateful.” There furthermore was a secretive facet to his complex nature, and he had his own reasons for not dwelling on or divulging details of his private life and family relationships.
At the age of ten young Arouet was placed at the renowned Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand, in the Latin Quarter, where he received a solid education in the classics, where his knowledgeable and supportive masters nurtured his precocious interest and talent in drama and poetry, and where he formed lifelong friendships with some of his classmates.
Having completed his studies in 1711, the seventeen-year-old Arouet adamantly refused to obey his father’s stern injunction to go to law school, for by now he was intent on becoming a man of letters. While still at Louis-le-Grand, he had been introduced to a group of Epicurean libertines, or freethinkers who subsequently congregated at the Temple of the Knights of Malta and therefore became known as the Society of the Temple. He rubbed elbows with young aristocrats chafing under the austere and oppressively religiosity of the court of the aging Louis XIV, who would die in 1715, and his successor, the notorious Philippe II, duke of Orleans, regent of France until 1723. This period was marked in elite and sophisticated circles by a disdainful disregard for traditional values and a hedonistic love of life and of beauty in all its forms, especially in the arts and letters.
Young Arouet thrived in this pleasure-loving milieu, increasingly asserting himself as an aspiring dramatist, and author of light and satirical verses, a wit especially gifted with sharp, ironic repartees, and a skeptic in religious matters. In 1718 he had his first great success with his tragedy
Oedipe
, his version of the Oedipus myth made famous by Sophocles and also treated by Pierre Corneille, the great seventeenth-century French dramatist. The triumph of his play induced him in 1719 to leave his bourgeois origins behind once and for all by adopting the more euphonious and aristocratic pen name “de Voltaire.”
Meanwhile, he had already gotten a rather bitter taste of Old Regime justice when, as the author of satirical verses directed against the regent, he was forced to spend eleven months in the infamous Bastille prison, from May 1717 to April 1718. Then in 1726 an incident occurred that would mark the turning point in his life and career. Voltaire quarreled with the chevalier de Rohan, scion of one of the most powerful French families, who had his lackeys beat him up for blatantly assuming an aristocratic name; the young writer failed to gather support among his aristocratic friends in his desperate attempts to find redress in a duel with the chevalier, who persistently refused to honor a mere commoner with this distinction. Instead he was once more hustled off to the Bastille, but after a two-week stay was offered the alternative of going into exile. He opted for England.
Voltaire’s stay in England, from May 1726 to November 1728, profoundly transformed and enriched his intellectual and aesthetic outlook, as the
Lettres philosophiques
(1734), one of his most original and striking works, (an English version titled
Letters Concerning the English Nation
had appeared in 1733) amply testifies. He vividly and most sympathetically evokes life in eighteenth-century England, primarily in order to contrast it favorably with French laws, customs, traditions, science, philosophy, and even literature. He humorously describes the apparently bizarre mores of the Quakers, primarily in order to underscore religious intolerances in France. Also featured are such powerful political institutions as the English Parliament, with its House of Commons; English empiricist philosophy and science as embodied by Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton; and English tragedy and comedy, with the focus on William Shakespeare as a new kind of genius, untrammeled by classical rules and conventions. From a sharp-tongued wit, a gifted poet, and a dramatist, Voltaire had made himself over into a
philosophe
who soon would become the undisputed leader of the Enlightenment movement. The book on England was promptly condemned and publicly burned in France, and its author had to seek refuge near the eastern border, in the province of Champagne, at Cirey, where he settled in the château of Madame du Châtelet, a remarkable woman who was a brilliant intellectual and a scientist in her own right.
Voltaire lived in Cirey for fifteen happy and productive years, from 1734 until 1749, when the premature death of Madame du Châtelet left him disconsolate and at long last open to the repeated offers of hospitality of Fredrick the Great of Prussia, a long-time admirer and correspondent of the
philosophe
, who had been urging him to become his permanent guest at his court at Potsdam.
While at Cirey Voltaire deepened his knowledge of Newtonian mathematics and physics, which in 1738 would result in
Eléments de la philosophie de Newton
(
Elements of Newton’s Philosophy
), a distinguished work of scientific popularization. He also pondered the philosophy of Leibniz at the instigation of Madame du Châtelet, and he embarked upon his great cultural histories, most notably
Le siècle de Louis XIV
(
The Age of Louis XIV
), published in 1751, in which he pointedly extols the glorious scientific, artistic, and literary achievements of France during the glorious reign of the so-called Sun King at the expense of Louis XV.
During his stay in England and at Cirey Voltaire’s outlook on life was essentially optimistic. In the twenty-fifth and last of his
Lettres philosophiques
he sternly took Pascal to task for his pessimistic depiction of the human condition, describing him as a “sublime misanthrope” ; and in his poem
Le Mondain
(The Worldly One), published in 1736, he sharply ridiculed the myth of primitive happiness and innocence during the so-called Golden Age, as embodied in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Conversely, he extolled the Epicurean delights of comfort and luxury brought about by modern civilization. In spite of his controversial reputation, he garnered such high official honors as being elected to the French Academy in 1746. He was still convinced that, on the whole, Newton’s eminently rational laws permitted human beings to accommodate themselves and seek their happiness within this orderly universe, set in motion by a supremely powerful but also benevolent being. And as a deist, he generally also subscribed to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory that God would not create a universe other than the best of all possible universes, as expounded in his
Theodicy
(1710).
Voltaire’s stay at the court of Frederick II, from 1750 until 1753, turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Frederick was basically an autocrat, in spite of his much-publicized image as an enlightened “philosopher king.” Voltaire’s irrepressible wit and bold irreverence were bound to displease and eventually anger his royal host, and eventually Voltaire had to leave Prussia hurriedly and under humiliating circumstances. After some hesitation as to where to find a safe refuge, he settled down in Geneva in December 1759. when he moved to a property he acquired at nearby Ferney, which would be his retreat for the next nineteen years, until shortly before his death in Paris, on May 30, 1778.
Voltaire’s early optimism underwent a profound change under the impact of events in his personal life as well as in reaction to those natural and man-made catastrophes that made him keenly aware of human suffering and misery, not to mention the multiple dangers that constantly threaten our very existence, let alone our well-being and chances of achieving happiness. His own disappointments—notably the unexpected loss of Madame du Châtelet, the unrelenting hostility of the court of Louis XV, the disenchantment with Frederick, and the precariousness of his personal situation—were compounded by his intense and immediate empathy; he spontaneously identified with all victims of calamities, war, injustice, prejudice, and intolerance.
The news of the terrible Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, overwhelmed him with dreadful images of women and children buried under the rubble, and inspired his eloquently anguished
Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne
(Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon), published in 1756, in which he clearly signals his rejection of Leibniz’s concept of a rational and well-regulated universe. The protracted and devastating Seven Years War (1756-1763), which began when Frederick invaded Saxony and soon expanded the lingering hostilities between France and England into a European conflagration, also deeply affected Voltaire’s outlook on the human condition.
Voltaire began writing philosophical
contes
(tales) relatively late in his career and almost as an afterthought, for he subscribed to the neoclassical canon and hierarchy of literary genres according to which tragedy in verse and epic poetry gave an author his most reliable passport to posterity and immortality. Novels, short stories, and
contes
were looked upon suspiciously as upstart genres with no credible aesthetic or even moral pedigree.
Voltaire began with the traditional short story or novella, and transformed it into the
conte philosophique
, or philosophical tale, a fast-moving and highly entertaining story combining multiple adventures and voyages with an underlying philosophical and moral theme, written in a pithy style replete with humor, satire, irony, and sly sexual innuendoes. Indeed, ridicule would be Voltaire’s most effective weapon against his main targets: fanaticism, intolerance, war, and cruelty.
One of Voltaire’s early philosophical tales is
Zadig
, subtitled
La Destinée
(Destiny), which appeared in 1747. It is set in the kind of whimsically imaginary and exotic Oriental setting dear to eighteenth-century authors from Montesquieu to Diderot. The uncannily wise, resourceful, and resilient Zadig, whose name derives from the Arabic
sadik
(“just”), undergoes a number of trials and tribulations, and when faced with disconcerting instances of injustice and suffering, and with the unpredictability and apparent randomness of life in general, anxiously questions and even objects to the notion of a world regulated by a benevolent Providence. But Zadig eventually overcomes adversity and reluctantly submits to the reassuring belief that Providence works in mysterious and unfathomable ways for the ultimately greater good of humanity.
While still in Prussia, Voltaire published
Micromégas
in 1752. Partially inspired by Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
(1726) and by Cyrano de Bergerac’s two fantastic romances about visits to the moon and sun—
Autre Monde: ou, Les Estats et empires de la lune
(1657) and
Les Estats et empires du soleil
(1662)—it is a science-fiction story of fantastic, humorous interplanetary travel that strongly reflects Newton’s cosmology and Locke’s empiricism, and that pointedly resorts to fictional and comic devices in order to fuse science and moral philosophy. In a universe of multiple planets inhabited by creatures of various gigantic dimensions, the remarkable scientific knowledge of the minuscule earthlings is duly acknowledged, but at the same time their basic ignorance in matters of ultimate human values, masked by hubris and pedantry, is pointedly ridiculed and excori ated, especially when viewed from the perspective of two extraterrestrial visitors, Micromégas, the giant originating from Sirius, and his smaller but still huge traveling companion, whom he had picked up on the planet Saturn in the course of his celestial peregrinations.
Candide, the hero of the philosophical tale by that name, came into the world in January 1759 unacknowledged by his creator. The work was proposed as a translation “from the German of Doctor Ralph, with the additions found in the Doctor’s pocket when he died at Minden, in the Year of Our Lord 1759.” It was customary for Voltaire to deny the paternity of his most potentially controversial writings by mischievously attributing them to imaginary or even real persons to maintain a near total silence about the circumstances and composition of his works of prose fiction.
Voltaire was hardly an introspective author, and in this, as in so many other respects, he stands at the opposite pole from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who insisted, in full knowledge of the dangers involved, on publicly proclaiming the authorship of all his writings and who in both his
Confessions
(1781, 1788) and correspondence provides much detailed information on their genesis, publication, and immediate public response, as well as official reaction.