Titans of History

Thousands died at his hands; his taxes and wars had ruined his own people and at his death, his empire fell to pieces. Yet his was an astonishing achievement. He was as brilliant as he was brutal: centuries later, Stalin studied Nader Shah as a man to admire for his flawed but pitiless grandeur.

VOLTAIRE

1694–1778

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.

Voltaire

The writer, philosopher, literary celebrity and friend of kings, François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was the star of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the most influential men in Europe—and also one of the richest. His ridicule of the absurdities and atrocities of 18th-century Europe helped to give birth to the modern world—a world in which science and reason replaced superstition. Thanks to his indignation and energy, freedom of speech and of belief, and the even-handed administration of justice, came to be regarded as inalienable human rights.

Voltaire was famed even in his own time as a tireless multi-talented genius. He excelled as a playwright, a poet, a novelist, a satirist, a polemicist, a historian, a philosopher, a financial investor and a (sometimes sycophantic) courtier. Of his prodigious output of over 350 works, it is the slim satire Candide (1759) that most completely encapsulates his brilliance. Published, like most of Voltaire’s work, to instant popular acclaim, it follows the hapless eponymous hero through a series of grim adventures as he clings to the conventional religio-philosophical piety that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”—despite increasingly conclusive evidence, as horror piles on horror, to the contrary. A devastatingly witty attack on everything from slavery to the professions,

Candide exemplifies the power of Voltaire’s razor-sharp pen to deflate pretension and hypocrisy.

Wiry, mischievous and wickedly brilliant, Voltaire was the changeling in an otherwise entirely conventional wealthy bourgeois family. He personally encouraged the rumors that his paternity lay elsewhere. By his late teens his acid wit—he once remarked of a rival poet’s “Ode to Posterity” that “I fear it will not reach its mark”—had made him the pet of aristocratic society. Voltaire, the financial wizard, made a fortune from canny manipulation of the Paris lottery. Cirey, the Lorraine estate on which Voltaire spent ten years with his great love, the married and beautiful mathematics scholar the Marquise de Châtelet in the 1730s and 1740s, became a hothouse of intellectual debate and social mischief.

Voltaire’s campaign against the monarchy’s arbitrary practices was informed by firsthand experience: as a youth, his satirical pen had briefly landed him in the Bastille. A subsequent exile in London (1726–9) alerted Voltaire to the contrast between England’s intellectual openness and the oppressive censorship of France. In his Philosophical Letters

, published on his return to France in 1729, Voltaire embarked on a lifelong attack on the injustice and intolerance fostered by the Catholic Church and France’s absolute monarchy. Thereafter, Voltaire and the French authorities existed in an uneasy truce. He briefly held a court appointment as royal historiographer in the 1740s, although his rooms—“the most stinking shit hole in Versailles”—disappointed him. But having come to the conclusion that “I am very fond of the truth, but not at all of martyrdom,” he spent most of his life away from the center.

He based himself at Geneva from 1755, then, in 1759, settled at nearby Ferney in French territory, whose proximity to the Swiss border afforded him luxurious safety to exercise his pen. The pseudonyms he used were flimsy to say the least: he favored the Archbishop of Paris for his most virulent attacks on the church. But they allowed him to disavow authorship, with wide-eyed innocence, while the outraged authorities banned and burned his books.

Voltaire’s outstanding achievement was his campaign for civil rights, waged under his motto “Écrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the infamy”). His calls for religious freedom and judicial fairness ushered in a new era. Leg braces, thumbscrews, the rack, sleep deprivation, pouring water on rags stuffed into the victim’s throat to induce the sensation of drowning, hanging a victim by their arms with weights attached to their ankles—these were just some of the methods used in prisons across Europe in Voltaire’s time to extract confessions from the “guilty.”