Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire (also called The Dictator of Letters), was a French Enlightenment writer, deist and philosopher.

Works

Voltaire was a prolific writer and produced works in almost every literary form, authoring plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, pamphlets, and over 20,000 letters.

Related Topics:
Literary - Poetry - Novels - Essays - Pamphlets

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Major works

• Oedipe (1718)
• Zaire (1732)
• Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733), revised as Letters on the English (c. 1778)
• Le Mondain (1736)
• Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)
• Zadig (1747)
• Micromegas (1752)
• Candide (1759)
• Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
• Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs (Letter to the author of The Three Impostors) (1770)

Plays

Voltaire wrote between fifty and sixty plays (including a few unfinished ones). Ironically, despite Voltaire's comic talent, he wrote only one good comedy, Nanine, but many good tragedies -- two of them, Zaire and Mérope, are ranked among the ten or twelve best plays of the whole French classical school.

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• Ecossaise
• Eriphile (1732)
• Mahomet
• Mérope
• Nanine
• Zaire (1732)

Poetry

From an early age, Voltaire displayed a talent for writing verse, and his first published work was poetry.

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Voltaire wrote two long poems, the Henriade, and the Pucelle, besides many other smaller pieces. The Henriade has by wide consent been relegated to the position of a school reading book. Constructed and written in almost slavish imitation of Virgil, employing for medium a very unsuitable vehicle—the Alexandrine couplet (as reformed and rendered monotonous for dramatic purposes)—and animated neither by enthusiasm for the subject nor by real understanding thereof, it could not but be an unsatisfactory performance.

Related Topics:
Virgil - Alexandrine

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The Pucelle, if morally inferior, is from a literary point of view of far more value, it is desultory to a degree; it is a base libel on religion and history; it differs from its model Lodovico Ariosto in being, not, as Ariosto is, a mixture of romance and burlesque, but a sometimes tedious tissue of burlesque pure and simple. Nevertheless, with all the Pucelle 's faults, it is amusing. The minor poems are as much above the Pucelle as the Pucelle is above the Henriade.

Related Topics:
Lodovico Ariosto - Burlesque

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Prose and romances

These productions—incomparably the most remarkable and most absolutely good fruit of his genius—were usually composed as pamphlets, with a purpose of polemic in religion, politics, or what not. Thus Candide attacks religious and philosophical optimism, L'Homme aux quarante ecus certain social and political ways of the time, Zadig and others the received forms of moral and metaphysical orthodoxy, while some are mere lampoons on the Bible, the unfailing source of Voltaire's wit. But (as always happens in the case of literary work where the form exactly suits the author's genius) the purpose in all the best of them disappears almost entirely.

Related Topics:
Pamphlet - Bible

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It is in these works more than in any others that the peculiar quality of Voltaire—ironic style without exaggeration—appears. If one especial peculiarity can be singled out, it is the extreme restraint and simplicity of the verbal treatment. Voltaire never dwells too long on this point, stays to laugh at what he has said, elucidates or comments on his own jokes, guffaws over them or exaggerates their form. The famous "pour encourager les autres" (that the shooting of Byng did "encourage the others" very much is not to the point) is a typical example, and indeed the whole of Candide shows the style at its perfection. Voltaire has, in common with Jonathan Swift, the distinction of paving the way for science fiction's philosophical irony. See especially Micromegas.

Related Topics:
Jonathan Swift - Science fiction - Micromegas

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Historical

Voltaire wrote several major historical works, including:

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• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (2 volumes 1731 age:37)
• The Age of Louis XIV (3 volumes 1752 age 58)
• The Age of Louis XV (3 Volumes 1746 age 52 to 1752 age 58)
• Annals of the Empire - Charlemagne, A.D. 742 - Henry VII 1313, Vol. I (1754 age: 60)
• Annals of the Empire - Louis of Bavaria, 1315 to Ferdinand II 1631 Vol.II (1754 age: 60)
• History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great (Vol I, 1759 age: 65; Vol. II 1763 - age 69)

An Investigator of Gospels

Voltaire opposed Christian beliefs fiercely, but not consistently. On one hand, he claimed that the Gospels were figmented and Jesus did not exist--that they were produced by those who wanted to create God in their own image and were full of discrepancies. On the other hand, he claimed that this very same community preserved the texts without making any change to adjust those discrepancies. However, the defense of Christian apologetics of his time was usually not very convincing either, as many avoided Voltaire's work.

Related Topics:
Christian - Gospel - Jesus - Apologetic

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Philosophy

To his own age Voltaire was pre-eminently a poet and a philosopher; the unkindness of succeeding ages has sometimes questioned whether he had any title to either name, and especially to the latter. His largest philosophical work, at least so called, is the curious medley entitled Dictionnaire philosophique, comprising articles contributed by him to the great Encyclopédie and of several minor pieces. None of Voltaire's works shows his anti-religious or at least anti-ecclesiastical animus more strongly. The various title-words of the several articles are often the merest stalking horses, under cover of which to shoot at the Bible or the church, the target being now and then shifted to the political institutions of the writer's country, his personal foes, etc., and the whole being largely seasoned with that acute, rather superficial, common-sense, but also commonplace ethical and social criticism which the 18th century called philosophy. The book ranks perhaps second only to the novels as showing the character, literary and personal, of Voltaire; and despite its form it is nearly as readable.

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Miscellaneous

In general criticism and miscellaneous writing Voltaire is not inferior to himself in any of his other functions. Almost all his more substantive works, whether in verse or prose, are preceded by prefaces of one sort or another, which are models of his own light pungent causerie; and in a vast variety of nondescript pamphlets and writings he shows himself a perfect journalist. In literary criticism pure and simple his principle work is the Commentaire sur Corneille, though he wrote a good deal more of the same kind—sometimes (as in his Life and notices of Molière) independently sometimes as part of his Siécles. Nowhere, perhaps, except when he is dealing with religion, are Voltaire's defects felt more than here. He was quite unacquainted with the history of his own language and literature, and more here than anywhere else he showed the extraordinarily limited and conventional spirit which accompanied the revolt of the French 18th century against limits and conventions in theological, ethical and political matters.

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Correspondence

There remains only the huge division of his correspondence, which is constantly being augmented by fresh discoveries, and which, according to Georges Bengesco, has never been fully or correctly printed, even in some of the parts longest known. In this great mass Voltaire's personality is of course best shown, and perhaps his literary qualities not worst. His immense energy and versatility, his adroit and unhesitating flattery when he chose to flatter, his ruthless sarcasm when he chose to be sarcastic, his rather unscrupulous business faculty, his more than rather unscrupulous resolve to double and twist in any fashion so as to escape his enemies—all these things appear throughout the whole mass of letters.

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Voltaire's works, and especially his private letters, constantly contain the word l'infâme and the expression (in full or abbreviated) écrasez l'infâme. This has been misunderstood in many ways - the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose that Voltaire meant Christ by this opprobrious expression. No careful and competent student of his works has ever failed to correct this gross misapprehension. L'infâme is not God; it is not Christ; it is not Christianity; it is not even Catholicism. Its briefest equivalent may be given as "persecuting and privileged orthodoxy" in general, and, more particularly, it is the particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of which he had felt the effects in his own exiles and the confiscations of his books, and of which he saw the still worse effects in the hideous sufferings of Calas and La Barre.

Related Topics:
Christ - God - Christianity - Catholicism - Calas - La Barre

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