Voltaire aka François Arouet

 Voltaire

François Arouet, who became known as Voltaire (1694-1778), wrote poetry and plays, and for expressing his opinions he was twice sent to prison. He was in exile in England from 1726 to 1729. And, like Montesquieu, he developed an admiration for British institutions. Voltaire admired Britain's Tolerance Act of 1689 and its absence of censorship. He saw benefit in variety, claiming that if England had but one religion it would still be despotic, that if England had just two faiths those faiths would be at each others throat. But with thirty different religious groupings, he claimed, Britain lived as a happy land where the spirit of Greece lived on.

Voltaire had also been influenced by Newton and Locke. He disliked theories not supported by observation and experiment. But he spun such theories himself. In arguing against the Great Flood described in the Old Testament, he attempted to explain the presence of sea shells on Mt Cenis in the Alps. He claimed that "the earth has always remained as it was when it was first created" but that collectors of sea shells could have put the shells there, that small farmers could have dumped the shells with their loads of lime to fertilize the soil, or that the shells might have been badges that had dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way to Rome.

Voltaire was awed by the grandness of the cosmos and saw the cosmos moved by immutable laws that could not be altered by prayer. Voltaire was a deist, and in one of his attacks on conventional religion he wondered why the god of the Old Testament had created humans with a capacity for pleasure and then damned them for using it. He wondered why Jehovah had created humans and then drowned them in His flood. He attacked the idea of original sin, wondering why children should be punished for the sins of their first father, Adam.

Voltaire didn't see original sin as an excuse. In his novel Candide he expressed annoyance at people massacring each other, and he described people as liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunkenness, grasping, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical and silly. Like Montesquieu he feared the passion of common people, and he too disliked democracy. But he also ridiculed the hauteur of aristocrats, and he thought himself the friend of peasants and serfs. He spoke with admiration for William Penn and the Quakers. He opposed all forms of slavery. He hoped that enlightened monarchs would rule above class interests and keep a firm but tolerant reign on society for the sake of all.

He was too pessimistic about humanity to formulate a utopia. He argued that the world would improve as ignorance and superstition were replaced by more knowledge, more reason, sympathy and more tolerance. Voltaire wanted more education, but it was not the poor and unskilled laborer he wished to educate; it was the middle class. "When the populace meddles in reasoning," he wrote, "all is lost." The lower classes, he believed, needed religion and needed to be preached to about virtue.

In 1731 Voltaire's History of Charles XII was published, a narrative written while he was in exile in England. Voltaire, it is said, tried to separate fiction and fact and tried to explain Charles – Sweden's war-making monarch and invader of Russia back in 1708 – as an extraordinary man worthy of respect.

In 1743 Voltaire was elected to England's Royal Society. In 1746 he was admitted to the French Academy. In 1751 his book The Age of Louis XIV was published. In 1756 he wrote his "Essay on the Manners and Spirit of the Nations." And in 1759 Candide was published.

Voltaire liked recognition and associating with celebrities and the powerful. Despite his belief in tolerance he railed against the Roman Catholic Church, describing it as the fountainhead and bulwark of evil. He had been put off by the Church's opposition to new scientific views, including those of Galileo and Newton. He believed that the kind of change he wanted was not possible without undermining the power of the Church. Then later in his life, to advance his career, he started a campaign to endear himself to Pope Benedict XIV. This was a Pope that had respect for some of what accompanied the Enlightenment, especially tolerance. Pope Benedict brought a storm of protest upon himself by his friendly response to Voltaire, including his calling Voltaire his "dear son" and sending him his "blessing."