His departure for London was precipitated when he unwisely became involved in a humiliating argument with an aristocrat, who had him briefly interned in the Bastille. Voltaire arrived in London in the autumn of , and what had begun partly as self-imposed exile became a crucially formative period for him. In truth, he was a philosopher before coming to England, and it would be more accurate to say that Voltaire came to England a poet and left it a prose writer.
Voltaire thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and during his long life he would never abandon the writing of verse, for which he had a remarkable facility many of his letters are sprinkled with seemingly spontaneous passages of verse.
It is hardly coincidental, therefore, that before returning to France in , Voltaire began writing his first two major essays in prose: a history, the Histoire de Charles XII , and a book about the English, which is now best known under the title Lettres philosophiques , but was first published in English translation London as the Letters Concerning the English Nation.
He had turned fifty and was now the leading poet and dramatist of his day; perhaps even Voltaire did not imagine that the works which would make him even more celebrated still lay in the future. Throughout his career, however, Voltaire was prone to involvement in literary quarrels, and his time in Berlin was no exception; his attack on Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy, caused Frederick II to lose patience with him.
They corresponded on literary and philosophical matters, and Voltaire sent Frederick many of his works in manuscript. Their exchange of more than seven hundred letters remains as an extraordinary literary achievement in its own right. The Lisbon earthquake of November may have disturbed his philosophical certainties and caused him to doubt the Leibnizian Optimism which Alexander Pope had helped to popularize, but it did not disturb his new-found personal happiness.
His prose response to the catastrophe, in Candide , took longer to mature and was published in Geneva turned out not to be the model republic that Voltaire had imagined or hoped it was, and after a number of tussles with clerical authority, he resolved to leave the city.
A return to Paris would not have been welcomed by the government, so he purchased a house and estate at Ferney, where he installed himself in — on French soil now, but within striking distance of the border. It was in this symbolically marginal position that Voltaire was to live for the rest of his life. But this new-found role did not mean that, like Candide, Voltaire had found happiness in cultivating his garden and in ignoring the world beyond. The ancient Greek tale chronicles the downfall of Oedipus, who fulfilled a prophecy that he would kill his father, the king of Thebes, and marry his mother.
Greek playwright Sophocles wrote the earliest version of the play in his tragedy, Oedipus Rex. As recently as , the famed French dramatist Pierre Corneille had adapted the play, but Arouet thought the story deserved an update, and he happened to be living at the perfect time to give it one.
One of the most powerful rulers in the history of France, raising its fortunes and expanding colonial holdings, Louis also dragged the country into three major wars.
He centralized power in France and elevated the Catholic Church by ruthlessly persecuting French Protestants. His great-grandson, at age 5, needed a regent to oversee the ruling of the state. Philippe change the geopolitical trajectory of France, forming alliances with Austria, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.
He also upended the old social order, opposing censorship and allowing once-banned books to be reprinted. For Arouet, the loosening of social restrictions created an almost limitless sense of possibilities, and harnessing theater was perhaps the most effective way to spread the message of freedom and tolerance to the public. As for where his work would be performed, only one choice presented itself, even though Paris hosted multiple theaters.
Against Leibniz, for example, who insisted that all physics begin with an accurate and comprehensive conception of the nature of bodies as such, Newton argued that the character of bodies was irrelevant to physics since this science should restrict itself to a quantified description of empirical effects only and resist the urge to speculate about that which cannot be seen or measured. This removal of metaphysics from physics was central to the overall Newtonian stance toward science, but no one fought more vigorously for it, or did more to clarify the distinction and give it a public audience than Voltaire.
It also accused Leibniz of becoming deluded by his zeal to make metaphysics the foundation of physics. In this way, Voltaire should be seen as the initiator of a philosophical tradition that runs from him to Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin, and then on to Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins in the twentieth century.
The result has been the production of three major collections of his writings including his vast correspondence, the last unfinished. The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger every day.
The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted to scholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed. Paris: Lefevre, — Moland and G. Fleming ed. Du Mont, Shorter Writings of Voltaire , J. Rodale ed. Barnes, Tallentyre tr. Applegate ed. Ungar, Voltaire: Selected Writings , Christopher Thacker ed. Voltaire: Selections , Paul Edwards ed. Brumfitt ed. Pollack tr. Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia , Glasgow, Swallow, Eckler, The Sermon of the Fifty , J.
Paxton, London: Cass, Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, Philosophical Dictionary Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, Translated by Peter Gay.
New York: Basic Books, Steiner ed. Leonard Tancock ed. Ernest Dilworth ed. Nicholas Cronk ed. Taylor ed. Harvard Classics, Vol. Allen, Candide, or Optimism Hundreds of English editions of this text have been published, so this list is restricted to the most important scholarly editions published since Niven ed. Candide and other Writings , Haskell M. Block ed. Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others eds. Shane Weller ed. Robert Martin Adams ed.
Norton, Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, Candide and Related Texts , David Wooton ed. Lowell Bair ed. Crocker ed. Raffael Burton ed. Theo Cuffe ed. Candide and other Stories , Roger Pearson ed. Secondary Literature The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger every day.
Barber, W. Barrell, Rex A. Brooks, Richard A. Brumfitt, J. Collins, J. Conlon, Pierre M. Dickinson, H. Louis: Washington University Press. Ehrman, Esther, , Mme. Guerlac, Henry, , Newton on the Continent , Ithaca.
Gurrado, Antonio, , Voltaire cattolico , Torino: Lindau. Hagengruber, Ruth ed. Lanson, Gustave, , Voltaire , Paris: Hachette. Lilti, Antoine, , Le monde des salons.
Mattei, Silvia, , Voltaire et les voyages de la raison , Paris: Harmattan. McMahon, Darrin M. Northeast, Catherine M. Palmer, Robert R. Pappas, John N. Schlereth, Thomas J. Shank, J. Torrey, Norman L. Zinsser, Judith and Hayes, Julie eds. Academic Tools How to cite this entry. Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
The Voltaire Foundation , Oxford University.
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