Painting by Jean Huber, a friend of the writer who produced a large number of drawings and watercolors featuring Voltaire.
From 1759 onward, Voltaire lived in Ferney, near the Swiss border. He bought land and quickly made it prosper, developing a passion for “the plough and the vine.” Though he could no longer travel to Paris, all of Europe came to his table: he often hosted fifty guests for lunch.
From the Lettres philosophiques he published upon his return from England to his final battles on behalf of Calas at the age of seventy, Voltaire never ceased to wage war against “the infamous thing.” It is moving to see how, even at the end of his life, he could not grow indifferent to the spectacle of injustice; instead, he burned with indignation and led fierce campaigns against it.
Yet, and this is the complexity of his character, he never advocated equality for all. He believed that peasants existed to provide for intellectuals, and that the people should be guided, not educated. This conviction set him radically apart from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire was harsh—one might even say merciless—towards Rousseau; he could not tolerate him. It is regrettable that a great defender of tolerance made an exception in order to hound a philosopher already persecuted and threatened by the authorities. But Voltaire had sensed Rousseau’s extraordinary power. In his shadow, one could discern the coming French Revolution—and perhaps even the communist revolutions of later centuries.
Can we understand Voltaire today—a man who fought against injustice while accepting inequality? For many, it is easier to side with Rousseau, who associated property with injustice. In any case, this fundamental opposition between the two thinkers would echo through most of the major political debates of the centuries to come, including our own.
Voltaire was imprisoned for being too insolent toward the powerful. He was even beaten for daring to respond to a duke’s provocation, and then jailed again to prevent him from seeking revenge. His extreme caution in matters of expression is therefore understandable. Everyone knew he had written Candide, yet in 1759 he wrote to a correspondent:
Who are the idlers who attribute to me I know not what Candide, which is a schoolboy’s prank, and which they send to me from Paris? I have much more serious things to do.
Not only was he compelled to deny his works—even lying to those close to him—but he could not even correspond freely with his friends:
You ask me to send you the works I occupy myself with when I am not plowing or sowing. In truth, Madam, it is impossible, for I have become too bold with age; I can write only what I truly think, and I think with such freedom that it is impossible to send my ideas by mail.
This constraint awakened in Voltaire a prodigious talent for verbal acrobatics and a delight in playful disguise. Evading censorship, masking his identity, adapting his tone to each audience—these became a game to him, and one that he almost always won.
Anicet Lemonnier, “Reading of Voltaire’s The Orphan of China in the salon of Madame Geoffrin, in 1755”. Castle of Malmaison.
Madame Geoffrin’s salon was one of the principal centers of ideological influence in Voltaire’s time.
“We must cultivate our garden”—the famous conclusion of Candide—seems at first rather brief as a moral. Yet Flaubert once wrote to his mistress: “The lion’s claw is marked in this quiet conclusion, foolish as life.”
Here we find all the ambivalence of Voltaire’s personality. He was appalled by the stupidity and violence of the world: “Men are very foolish and very mad,” he laments in a letter. To the Marquise du Deffand he writes, “Ah, Madame, how stupid the world is! And how sweet it is to be outside it!” The first duty, then, is to create a space apart, a haven where one can enjoy freedom and pleasure. This is precisely what Voltaire did in Ferney: “I have made a small destiny for myself… I have resolved to become a completely free man.”
Yet Voltaire did not, in truth, retreat entirely to his garden. He renounced neither his pleasures nor his freedom of speech. He simply became prodigiously cunning, cultivating his tomatoes in peace while launching pamphlets against the Church.
Voltaire’s aesthetic ideal was resolutely classical, and yet he opened a path to something new. His admiration was first and foremost for Racine, Corneille, La Fontaine, and, in prose, Blaise Pascal (particularly Les Provinciales). Shakespeare, whom he discovered in England, translated, and helped introduce to France, seemed to him a rough genius. Fascinated by the theatre from his school days—where the Jesuits encouraged students to stage plays—Voltaire wrote constantly for the stage, acted, directed, and advised actors. He longed to be a great tragic poet, but his weakness lay in failing to offer truly new forms in this domain.
With his tales and his philosophical works of combat, however, he introduced a new tone, a new style—later called “Voltairean”—which became the very spirit of satirical journalism, so fertile in the nineteenth century and still present today in France in publications such as Le Canard enchaîné. Could he have innovated in this way had he not first acquired his writing virtuosity through the study of the classics?
In 1761, Voltaire was sixty-seven years old. He had long been battling obscurantism and religious fanaticism, contributing to Diderot’s Encyclopédie and publishing philosophical tales such as Zadig (1748) and Candide (1759). Yet it was a strange case, soon to reach his ears, that would engage him with all his strength.
From his exile in Ferney, at the foot of the Alps near the Swiss border, he fought tirelessly to obtain the rehabilitation of a man unjustly condemned. Armed with his pen and his considerable prestige throughout Europe, Voltaire embodied a new figure with a lasting future in France: that of the committed intellectual, capable of changing the world by appealing to public opinion.
The case would come to be known as “the Calas affair.” It began in Toulouse. In a family of Protestant merchants, a young man took his own life. Since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Protestantism had been barely tolerated in France. Suspicion from both judges and the public quickly fell upon the father…
Marc-Antoine Calas, the eldest child of a merchant family, commits suicide by hanging in the family home in Toulouse. The parents hide the suicide marks for fear of the infamous treatment reserved for suicide victims.
The father was suspected of having killed his son because he wanted to convert to Catholicism.
Accused of murdering his own son after a botched investigation carried out by judges eager to convict, Jean Calas is sentenced to be broken on the wheel and burned in the public square on March 10, 1762. His two daughters are placed in a convent, his property is confiscated, and one of his sons is banished from the kingdom.
Donat Calas, the youngest son of the Calas family, is in Geneva. Voltaire brings him to Ferney and his testimony convinces him completely.
Voltaire sends hundreds of letters, urging his correspondents to “move heaven and earth” on behalf of the Calas family, to “rouse all of Europe and let their cries ring in the ears of the judges.” He writes several pamphlets in defense of Calas and has them published in June 1762.
His friends take up the cause: Élie de Beaumont and Loyseau de Mauléon write legal briefs in support of Calas, which circulate throughout France.
The Parliament of Toulouse requires the widow Calas to pay the expenses of copy of all the documents of the lawsuit, requested by the Council of the king.
Required to pay the (high) copy fees of the acts of the parliament of Toulouse, the Calas family is in great difficulty because they have been dispossessed of their goods, and live in great poverty. Voltaire has the idea to launch a subscription by selling an engraving (picture above) produced in numerous copies, the profits going to the Calas family: it is a success!
The forty "maîtres des requêtes" (masters of the requests) deliver their decision unanimously : Jean Calas is rehabilitated, his widow, his children and his servant are compensated.
Victory!
Voltaire weeps when he hears the news.
“Here is an event which would seem to give hope for universal tolerance; however, it will not be obtained soon: men are not yet wise enough. They do not know that all kinds of religion must be separated from all kinds of government; that religion must not be a matter of state any more than the manner of cooking; that it must be permitted to pray to God in one’s own way, as well as to eat according to one’s own taste; and that, as long as one is subject to the laws, one’s stomach and one’s conscience must have complete freedom. That will come one day, but I will die with the pain of not having seen this happy time.
Voltaire, letter to M. Bertrand, March 19, 1765