François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694
His father, a well-established lawyer, sent him to the best school in the capital,
and by all accounts, he was a brilliant student.
The young Arouet, decided at an early age to make his name as a writer,
or rather to remake his name,
as the first thing he did was to change his name to Voltaire.
The 18th century is often referred to as the Age of Reason,
or the Age of Enlightenment,
but sometimes more fairly simply as the Age of Voltaire.
So, changing his name was a good call.
The age of Arouet, which is not of work quite as well.
Voltaire was precociously talented as a poet.
At the age of only 24,
he had his first verse tragedy performed at the Comédie-Française.
By then, he'd already begun work on an epic poem
about the French religious civil wars of the 16th century,
by pragmatically converting from Protestantism to Catholicism.
This was to be a subject dear to Voltaire's heart,
For under the guise of writing a national epic,
he was dwelling at length on the bloody consequences of religious intolerance.
Right from the start, Voltaire's views on religion were expressed robustly.
He was not an atheist.
In part, because he thought that some minimal belief in a deity
was useful for social cohesion.
Voltaire's God had created the world,
instilled in us a sense of good and evil and then basically taken a back seat.
This was known as rational religion,
Or in the 18th century called natural religion, or deism.
And it had no truck with metaphysics of any kind.
Voltaire was basically a man of reason,
who loathed fanaticism, idolatry and superstition.
That men can kill each other to defend some bit of religious doctrine,
which they scarcely understand, is something he found repellent.
And he reserved his greatest hatred for the clerics,
who exploited the credulity of believers to maintain their own power base.
Voltaire wanted religion but not the Church.
For obvious reasons, the Catholic authorities
were not keen for Voltaire's poem about Henry IV,
La Henriade, to be published in France.
So Voltaire decided to go and publish it in London instead,
and in 1726, went and traveled to England.
What began as a business trip soon turned, however, into something quite different.
And Voltaire ended up staying in England for some two and a half years.
He learned to speak English fluently, got to know writers and politicians,
and became a great admirer of English Protestant culture.
He decided to write a book about his experience of England.
And the Letters Concerning the English Nation appeared first in English in 1733.
The French authorities were horrified.
The book was censored and Voltaire only narrowly avoided prison.
That's because the book presented an informal portrait of English culture,
In a witty and ironical style looking in turn at religion, politics, science and literature,
in ways that were critical implicitly of French culture and politics.
Here, for example, is how Voltaire presents the Royal Exchange,
a handsome building in the heart of the City of London,
where merchants from across the world would meet to transact business.
"Take a view of the Royal Exchange," Voltaire wrote,
where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind.
There the Jew, the Muhammadan and a Christian transact together
as though they all profess the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but the bankrupts.
There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word.
At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly,
some will withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass.
This man goes and is baptised in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
that man has his son’s foreskin cut off,
whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child.
If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary;
if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats;
but as there as such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."
Voltaire's message is clear.
Religious differences are trivial and separate men,
while trade is important and brings them together.
His conclusion, that the plurality of religions in England leads to a more peaceful society,
is, of course, a covert criticism of France, where the Catholic Church was so dominant.
The Letters Concerning the English Nation,
also discuss Locke and Newton, thinkers then poorly known in France
The subject-matter might seem challenging, but Voltaire is a past master popularising difficult material.
Ask any schoolchild today what they know about Newton,
and they'll tell you about the apple falling on his head,
and the survival of this anecdote is due entirely to Voltaire.
He heard it from Newton's niece and immediately understood that this simple homely image
was the perfect way of conveying the simplicity of Newton's explanation of the force of gravity.
After Voltaire used the story in his Letters Concerning the English Nation,
everyone remembered it and Voltaire left his mark on English popular culture.
Voltaire struggled with the question of good and evil
the problem at the heart of his best-known work, Candide
which was published in 1759
and was a best seller from the moment it appeared.
Translated into every possible language,
it remains the most widely read work of the European Enlightenment.
It's even left its mark on our language
Expressions like 'pour encourager les autres' to encourage the others
or 'il faut cultiver le jardin', we must cultivate our garden
have entered common usage.
'In the best of all possible worlds', yes, that's another one
speakers of French or English quote Candide, without even realising it.
And that's the sure mark of a classic.
Candide is a timeless work, as satire of the human condition,
but it's also work of the Enlightenment and its philosophical theme is announced in the title:
"Candide" or "Optimism".
The hero of Candide, as his name tells us, is an innocent anti-hero.
He is in thrall to his tutor, Pangloss, who preaches the philosophy of Optimism.
This is not 'optimism' in the modern sense of looking on the bright side.
Optimism, spelled with a capital O and as expounded by the German philosopher, Leibniz,
was an attempt to answer the age-old problem of evil.
Why, if God is good, does he permit the existence of evil in the world?
To which the 18th century Leibnizian Optimist replies,
evil is all part of some greater pattern of good:
'All partial evil, universal good' as the English poet "Pope" put it.
In other words, evil doesn't really exist at all.
It's just something which man imagines because of his limited view of the world.
You might think this sounds like a bit of a confidence trick, Voltaire certainly did,
but this idea did find widespread acceptance in the 18th century.
Candide's great mission was to put this philosophy to the test.
Ejected from his comfortable home in an obscure German castle,
after trying to seduce the Baron's beautiful daughter, Cunégonde,
Voltaire's hero, Candide, undergoes many trials and tribulations:
conscripted into the army, he fights in a war,
then deserts, only to find himself a witness to an earthquake in Lisbon.
Candide is repeatedly brought face to face with evil in its most extreme forms:
moral evil, in the case of the earthquake, where man is not apparently to blame;
and most of all human evil, such as the war, where man is very definitely to blame.
Pangloss's breezy Optimism is clearly an inadequate response to enormities of evil on this scale.
Eventually, even Candide comes to realize this:
to quote from the book, 'And sometimes Pangloss would say to Candide:
After 1760, Voltaire took up residence in the château at Ferney, just outside Geneva.
By now, he was the most famous living writer in Europe,
and he became widely known as the ‘patriarch of Ferney’.
He took up a number of public causes.
In 1761, a Protestant merchant Jean Calas,
was accused of murdering his son and sentenced by the judges of Toulouse
to be tortured and then broken on the wheel.
The legal processes were, to say the least, irregular,
and the suspicions grew that the judges in his Catholic city
had acted with excessive zeal out of religious bigotry.
Voltaire became involved in the case
and mounted an energetic campaign to rehabilitate Calas’ memory
and help the members of his family, who had been left destitute.
He wrote letters to those in authority and published a stream of pamphlets,
culminating in 1763 in his Traité sur la tolérance,
which begins with the historical facts of the Calas case
and broadens out into a history of religious intolerance in European culture.
Voltaire's writings had enormous impact on public opinion,
and eventually the judges in Paris quashed the judgment of the Toulouse court.
Too late to save Calas, but a huge victory for Voltaire,
who had learnt an important lesson
about how change could be brought about through the pressure of public opinion.
Voltaire said of himself that he ‘wrote to act’,
and he wanted his writings to change the way people thought and behaved.
In leading his crusades against fanaticism, he even invented a campaign slogan,
Ecrasez l’Infâme!, which translates roughly as ‘Crush the despicable!’.
L’Infâme stands here for everything that Voltaire hates,
everything that he had spent his life fighting:
superstition, intolerance, irrational behaviour of every kind.
We should never forget that Voltaire was also a brilliant writer,
one of the greatest stylist the French language has ever known.
The power of his ideas had a lot to do with the power of his expression.
Many writers made fun of miracles.
No one did so hilariously as Voltaire.
Always, Voltaire had an ear for the telling phrase:
It's a good line, even in English, and better still in the original French
where it is more memorable because it is a classical alexandrine line in 12 syllables:
Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.
Voltaire's legacy in our present debates about religious toleration remain extremely potent.
Hardly a week passes without an article in the press quoting:
‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
This rallying cry of tolerant multiculturalism is so potent
that if Voltaire hadn't said it, we would have had to invent it,
which is what happened.
The expression was invented by an English woman in 1906.
No matter, it expresses a truth which is fundamentally important to our culture,
so we have adopted the phrase and decided that Voltaire said it.
Voltaire, his name has become synonymous with a set of liberal values:
freedom of speech, rejection of bigotry and superstition,
belief in reason and tolerance.
It's a unique, and nowadays, extremely precious legacy.