A French anglophile in the Age of Reason, Voltaire is best remembered for his fanciful philosophical tales -- "Candide," the most famous and well-constructed of these, is often referred to as the first novel. A reflective adventure story, "Candide" portrays a...
[more]A French anglophile in the Age of Reason, Voltaire is best remembered for his fanciful philosophical tales -- "Candide," the most famous and well-constructed of these, is often referred to as the first novel. A reflective adventure story, "Candide" portrays a thinking everyman who meanders through a weird, unreasonable world and tries to solve riddles that confront him. The work voices the main theoretical questions of his day: are humans essentially "barbaric" or "civilized," greedy or generous, intelligent or idiotic?
Voltaire rendered humankind in a dingy hue (though he didn't go as far as Hobbes, whose typical human was "nasty, brutish, solitary, and short"). For Voltaire, man-made horrors were the worst things on earth, yet they were inescapable. Order and reason were paramount but inaccessible. It made sense that everyone should get along, but why couldn't they? Though he poked fun at easy optimism, he did not descend into complacency or totalitarianism either. He denounced the church's tyranny and encouraged new standards of free speech. Voltaire asserted that if humans cannot naturally recognize their innate equality to each other, they must construct rules to ensure it. "All empires must fall," proclaims a character in his "Philosophical Dictionary."
Voltaire, like all philosophers worth their weight in paper, questioned his government. In fact, he practically began his career in prison for such criticisms: the 23-year-old, fresh out of law school, spent 11 months in the Bastille for writing satirical poetry about the Duke of Orleans. Undaunted, he eventually plunged back into writing and rose as a man of letters in polite society. Another quarrel with the aristocracy a few years later sent him back to prison and then to exile in England.
Voltaire found the English government preferable to the ancient regime; it was here that he made friends with those esteemed satirists, Swift and Pope. Back in France he published his "Philosophical Letters" (1734), which praised the English so highly that the French banned it. He spent the next 20 years expanding these letters into his controversial "Philosophical Dictionary." As a veteran of the prison system, he rallied for fair, humane punishment and wrote pioneering treatises on equality. He was member of the upper class who insulted his own, a believer who insisted on freedom of speech for blasphemers.
Throughout his life, Voltaire strove to incorporate a scientific objectivity into his political and moral philosophies. To Voltaire, freedom of speech and equality were as plain as Newton's apple -- "enlightenment," though vague, seemed a steady hope for the future.
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