Voltaire

From Philosopedia

Voltaire - François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778)

One of the most beloved of writers named by other humanists, Voltaire is a towering genius in intellectual and literary history. A skeptic and deist, he has the distinction of having merited thirty specific works on the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading.

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris into a middle-class family. His father was a minor treasury official.

Voltaire was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704-1711). He learned Latin and Greek and later in life he became fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English. From 1711 to 1713 he studied law. Before devoting himself entirely to writing, Voltaire worked as a secretary to the French ambassador in Holland. From the beginning, Voltaire had troubles with the authorities, and he energetically attacked the government and the Catholic church. These activities led to numerous imprisonments and exiles. In his early twenties he spent eleven months in the Bastille for writing satiric verses about the aristocracy.

He did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions, and his religiosity was anticlerical. With his brother Armand, who was a fundamentalist Catholic, Voltaire did not get on as well as with his sister. Voltaire considered atheism not as baleful as fanaticism, but it was nearly always fatal to virtue. The doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as nonsense. As a humanist, Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, but not necessarily in a direct way.

Well known is Voltaire's hostility toward the Jews. His play, Le Fantisme, ou Mahomet Le Prophète (1741), which portrayed the founder of Islam as an intriguer and greedy for power, was denounced by Catholic clergymen. They had no doubts that the true target was Christian fanaticism. However, Pope Benedict XIV, to whom Voltaire dedicated the work, replied by saying that he read it with pleasure.

In 1716 Voltaire was arrested and exiled from Paris for five months. From 1717 to 1718 he was imprisoned in the Bastille for lampoons of the Regency. During this time he wrote the tragedy, Oedipe, and started to use the name Voltaire. The play brought him fame, which did not lessen the number of his enemies at court.

At his 1726 stay at the Bastille, Voltaire was visited by a flow of admirers. Between 1726 and 1729 he lived in exile mainly in England. There he avoided trouble for three years and wrote in English his first essays, "Essays Upon Epic Poetry" and "Essay Upon the Civil Wars in France," which were published in 1727. After returning to France Voltaire wrote plays, poetry, historical and scientific treatises, and became royal historiographer. Histoire de Charles XII (1731) used novelistic technique and rejected the idea that divine intervention guides history. Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (1734) compared the French system of government with the system he had seen in England. Voltaire stated that he had perceived fewer barriers between occupations in England than in his own country. The book was banned, and Voltaire was forced to flee Paris. The English edition became a bestseller outside France.

His view on government, found in Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764):

• In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.

Voltaire's economic situation improved substantially when he joined a syndicate, which made a large profit with the state lottery. In addition, with lucky speculation in the Compagnie des Indes he became so wealthy that he lent money to dukes and princes.

Contents 1 Émilie 2 Marie-Louise 3 The Château in Ferney 4 Further Activities 5 His Views 6 The Philosophic Dictionary 7 Micromégas 8 A Saying He Did Not Write 9 His Impact 10 Death 11 Voltaire Society of America 12 Map of Ferney-Voltaire

Émilie

When 39, he began a 16-year liaison with Émilie du Chatele. She was 27, married, and the mother of three. "I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did," Voltaire wrote in his memoirs, "and who decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind." With her Voltaire lived at the Château de Cirey in 1734 to 1736 and from 1737 to 1740 - Voltaire took a refuge in Holland from 1736 to 1737. The Marquis du Châtelet was well aware of the affair. Mme. du Châtelet, who was a mathematician and scientist, translated Newton's Principia Mathematica and Voltaire wrote Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton.

Marie-Louise

In 1740 Voltaire was an ambassador-spy in Prussia, then in Brussels (1742-43), and in 1748 he was at the court of King Stanislas in Lunéville. From 1745 to 1750 he was a historiographer to Louis XV and in 1746 he was elected to the French Academy. In Paris, Voltaire had a new mistress, Marie-Louise Denis, his eldest niece. At the invitation of Fredrick the Great, Voltaire moved in 1750 to Berlin, realizing eventually that the ruler was more enlightened in theory than in practice.

The Château in Ferney

Voltaire settled in 1755 in 1755 in Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, apart from trips to France. He had his own château, Les Delices, outside Geneva, and later at nearby Ferney, in France. Anybody of note, from Boswell to Casanova, wanted to visit the place; Voltaire's conversations with visitors were recorded and published and he was flattered by kings and nobility. "Common sense is not so common," Voltaire wrote.

The Voltaire Society of America has helped to raise funds to keep Voltaire's Ferney château intact. In 1999 the ownership of his former home was transferred to the State.

Voltaire spent the last 20 years of his in the château, which is on the edge of the town of Ferney-Voltaire, a town that greatly increased in size and prospered under his influence. The château complex includes the château itself, a chapel, and other buildings set in a 17-acre park which on one side faces Mont-Blanc.

During Voltaire's two decades at Ferney, from 1759 until his triumphal return to Paris and death in 1778, his home served in one scholar's words as "the nerve center of Europe during the Enlightenment." At Ferney, Voltaire was visited by a steady stream of admirers, from Madame d'Epinay and d'Alembert to James Boswell, Adam Smith, Lord Chesterfield, and Edward Gibbon.

It was also here that the one-time enfant terrible of French letters was transformed as the Patriarch of Ferney, the defender of the Calas family, and the fervent champion of human freedom. From Ferney, Voltaire traversed the centuries as the prototype for every engagé intellectual from Hugo to Zola to Sartre.

In July 1996, for instance, at the end of a state visit to France, Nelson Mandela paid homage to "the land of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, the architects of the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity." In June 1997, it was reported that the new Socialist Premier of France, Lionel Jospin, was born "on a couch raised up on a set of the complete works of Voltaire to make it easier for the midwife."

The château's present collection includes a scintillating pastel likeness of Voltaire by Quentin de La Tour, a full-length figure of Madame du Châtelet by Marianne Loir, and a portrait of Catherine the Great woven in silk.

The château is being outfitted as an international center for research by visiting scholars, for college-level study-abroad programs, for publications, lectures, symposia, and conferences as well as exhibitions, theatrical, artistic, and other cultural endeavors that relate to Voltaire and the ideals he embodies.

Further Activities

In 1740 Voltaire was an ambassador-spy in Prussia, then in Brussels (1742-43), and in 1748 he was at the court of King Stanislas in Lunéville. From 1745 to 1750 he was a historiographer to Louis XV and in 1746 he was elected to the French Academy.

Voltaire settled in 1755 in 1755 in Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, apart from trips to France. He had his own château, Les Delices, outside Geneva, and later at nearby Ferney, in France. Anybody of note, from Boswell to Casanova, wanted to visit the place; Voltaire's conversations with visitors were recorded and published and he was flattered by kings and nobility. "Common sense is not so common," Voltaire wrote.

Voltaire's official publishers were Gabriel and Philibert Cramer from Geneva. They operated from Stockholm to Naples, and from Venice to Lisbon and Paris, spreading the ideas of Enlightenment. As an essayist Voltaire defended freedom of speech and religious tolerance. In his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) he defined the ideal religion - it would teach very little dogma but much morality. Voltaire's thoughts were condemned in Paris, Geneva, and Amsterdam. For safety reasons Voltaire denied his authorship.

In his late years Voltaire produced several anti-religious writing. In Ferney he built a chapel with the inscription 'Deo Erexit Voltaire' inscribed on the lintel. He also led campaign to open up a trial, in which the Huguenot merchant Jean Calas was found guilty of murdering his eldest son and executed. The parliament at Paris declared afterwards in 1765 Calas and all his family innocent.

He had been educated by the Jesuits, who found that early on he distinguished himself by his wit. Among his Gallic morsels:

• England has 42 religions and only 2 sauces.

Of martyrs, he wrote,

• We can only burst into laughter at all the humbug we are told about martyrs. . . . Can it be seriously repeated, that the Romans condemned seven virgins, each seventy years old, to pass through the hands of all the young men of the city of Ancyra - those Romans who punished the Vestals with death for the least gallantry?

Today he is best known for his Candide (1759) - the word comes from the Latin for “glowing with innocence," in which he satirizes Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism. “Let us cultivate our garden,” he concludes in common sense fashion instead of advising that we should spend our lives speculating about unanswerable questions.

His Views

Voltaire opposed atheism as well as materialism, reportedly saying of Helvétius and Holbach, although some claim it is a false quotation, that “if God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” He smiled, however, that “atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.” He thought Christianity was ideal for chambermaids and tailors but thought deism was best for the elite. He had learned about deism as a boy, for his godfather, a priest, is said to have taught him at the age of three a poem by J. B. Rousseau (not Jean Jacques Rousseau). That was a poem in which Moses and religious revelations in general are derided as being fraudulent.

Voltaire’s anticlericalism was such that he called the Jews “an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition.” In “For and Against,” Voltaire wrote, “I am not a Christian.” He also wrote

• I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belongs only to individuals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.

This he confirmed in a letter to Frederick the Great:

• Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

For a satirical pamphlet on the death of Louis XIV, Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for a year (1716) and, afterwards, was committed again for a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan - he threatened to duel his footmen, having been assaulted by them. On his liberation Voltaire went to England at the invitation of Lord Bolingbroke, where he became acquainted with the English freethinkers.

He spent most of his life in exile for the right of free speech, moving to Prussia and, from 1758 until his death, on the border of Switzerland in the event he had to flee. “During all this time,” Joseph McCabe wrote, “most of the chief bishops and archbishops lived in open license and luxury, and their modern successors profess to be shocked at the wicked Voltaire!” According to Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, Voltaire dedicated Mahomet to the Pope, “who was unable to see that its shafts were aimed at the pretenses of the church.” Joseph Mazzini Wheeler adds that in 1750 Voltaire accepted Frederick II’s invitation to reside at his court, “but he could not help laughing at the great king’s poetry.” Wheeler holds that Voltaire “did more than any other man of his century to abolish torture and other relics of barbarism, and to give just notions of history. To the last he continued to wage war against intolerance and superstition,” using more than one hundred thirty different pen-names.

Parton’s Life of Voltaire (Vol. II) tells of the following insight into Voltaire’s personality:

• While the great philosopher was living at Ferney in 1768, he gave a curious exhibition of that profane sportiveness which was a strong element in his character. On Easter Sunday he took his Secretary Wagniere with him to commune at the village church, and also “to lecture a little those scoundrels who steal continually.” Apprised of Voltaire’s sermon on theft, the Bishop of Anneci rebuked him, and finally “forbade every curate, priest, and monk of his diocese to confess, absolve, or give the communion to the seigneur of Ferney, without his express orders, under pain of interdiction.” With a wicked light in his eyes, Voltaire said he would commune in spite of the Bishop; nay, that the ceremony should be gone through in his chamber. Then ensued an exquisite comedy. Feigning a deadly sickness, Voltaire took to his bed. The surgeon, who found his pulse was excellent, was bamboozled into certifying that he was in danger of death. Then the priest was summoned to administer the last consolation. The poor devil at first objected, but Voltaire threatened him with legal proceedings for refusing to bring the sacrament to a dying man, who had never been excommunicated. This was accompanied with a grave declaration that M. de Voltaire “had never ceased to respect and to practice the Catholic religion.” Eventually the priest came “half dead with fear.” Voltaire demanded absolution at once, but the Capuchin pulled out of his pocket a profession of faith, drawn up by the Bishop, which Voltaire was required to sign. Then the comedy deepened. Voltaire kept demanding absolution, and the distracted priest kept presenting the document for his signature. At last the Lord of Ferney had his way. The priest gave him the wafer, and Voltaire declared, “Having God in my mouth,” that he forgave his enemies. As soon as he left the room, Voltaire leapt briskly out of bed, where a minute before he seemed unable to move. “I have had a little trouble,” he said to Wagniere, “with this comical genius of a Capuchin; but that was only for amusement, and to accomplish a good purpose. Let us take a turn in the garden. I told you I would be confessed and commune in my bed, in spite of M. Biord.”

His Mahomet remains controversial. In 1994, when it was proposed to stage the play in Geneva, representatives of rival Islamic cultural centers denounced the threatened “blasphemy,” and vague threats were made as to what might befall the actors, the directors, even the theatre-goers. In 1742 when the play had first been staged, an austere Catholic movement based at the Abbey of Port-Royal was similarly successful in stopping the production.

A profound and philosophic discussion of Voltaire’s achievements is found in Encyclopedia of Unbelief, in which Paul Edwards discusses how Voltaire covered the problem of evil, the argument from design, mortality, and miracles. What, Voltaire was asked, would he say if he saw the sun stop, if all the dead came back to life, and if all mountains fell into the ocean at the same time. “I would turn Manichean,” replied Voltaire. “I would say that there is one principle that unmakes what the other principle has made.”

More than any of the other Founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson admired Voltaire. He had begun to read Voltaire during his student days at the College of William and Mary. While America’s envoy to France, he acquired a complete set of Voltaire’s works and also shipped a copy of Voltaire’s memoirs back to James Madison in America. At Monticello, Jefferson showed off a plaster bust of Voltaire made by the French sculptor Houdon and an inkwell bearing the likeness of the French philosophe, said to have been given him by Lafayette during his farewell tour to America in 1824.

Michael Foot (New Humanist, December 1988) states that, if virtue consists of doing good and if loving mankind with a passion constitutes being a saint, then Voltaire is one. He quotes Voltaire’s witty description of a true saint, Professor Zapata, of the University of Salamanca: “He isolated truth from falsehood and separated religion from fanaticism. He taught and practised virtue. He was gentle, benevolent, modest; and was roasted at Valladolid in the year of grace, 1631.” His criticism was not merely directed against Christianity, for his Mahomet (1742) dealt with the fanaticism of Islam. In his Selected Works, Voltaire apparently glimpsed into his own future when he wrote, “The man who says to men, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I shall kill you.’ ”

“Animals have these advantages over man,” Voltaire wrote in 1769. “They never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death; they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.”

The Philosophic Dictionary

A translation in English of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary is not in print, but a two-volume work in 1856 was advertised as the first American stereotyped edition. Under the A’s, Voltaire included such as the following: Abraham, Adam, Adultery, Angels, Apocrypha, Apostate, Apostle, Ararat, Arianism, Aristotle, Army, Armies, Arts and Fine Arts, Ass, Astrology, Astronomy, Atoms, Avbarice, Augustine, Austerities, Authors, Authority. Under “Religion” in the dictionary, Voltaire starts as follows:

• The Epicureans, who had no religion, recommended retirement from public affairs, study, and concord. The sect was a society of friends, for friendship was their principal dogma.

He then says, while contemplating nature,

• When one of those genii who fill the spaces between worlds came down to me in order to reveal some of God’s works. . . . [The genie took him to a desolate spot to show him] the 23,000 Jews who danced before a calf, together with the 24,000 who were slain while ravishing Midianitish women. . . . “Here,” said the spirit,” are the 12 millions of Americans, slain in their own country for not having been baptised . . . etc.

Micromégas

Voltaire, in Micromégas, wrote about “aliens from outer space” visiting earth. They came from Saturn and from a planet in the solar system of the star Sirius, sometimes traveling by comet, sometimes by light waves. Unlike humans, with their five or six senses, the Sirian had a thousand senses although the poor Saturnian had only seventy-two. Presumably, the expression, “aliens from outer space,” was first used by Voltaire. The work contains jibes at the Jesuits, the sage who believes “God does everything for me,” and other philosophical or religious outlooks. As noted by Jim Herrick, the work approves “the Lockean who thinks humans must rely on their senses for knowledge, must revere the eternal power, and be content to believe ‘that more things are possible than we like to think.’ “

A Saying He Did Not Write

Voltaire never wrote, although he is often cited as the author, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." According to New Yorker Alan Kennis in The Economist (25 February 2006), that distinction belongs to the not very distinguished biographer of Voltaire, S. G. Tallentyre (pen name of Miss Evelyn Beatrice Hall), who took responsibility for the unintentional confusion in a letter published in "Modern Language Notes" in November 1943."

His Impact

Voltaire was the undisputed leader of the Age of Enlightenment. He had suffered throughout his life from poor health, but upon dying at the age of 84 he left behind him over fourteen thousand known letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets.

Among his best-known works is the satirical Candide (1759), which reflected the nihilism of Jonathan Swift. In the story the young and innocent hero, Candide, experiences a long series of misfortunes and disastrous adventures. He is kicked out of the castle of Thunder-Ten-Tronckh for making love to the baron's daughter, Cunégonde; in the army he is beaten nearly to death; in Lisbon he experiences the famous earthquake; he is hunted by the Inquisition and Jesuits, for he and his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, are made scapegoats by the Inquisition; Candide is flogged and his tutor is hanged, though somehow he survives the ordeal. Meanwhile Cunégonde's father, mother, and brother are hacked to pieces by invaders, and she is raped repeatedly. Eventually Candide marries Cunégonde, who has become an ugly gummy-eyed, flat-chested washerwoman, with wrinkled cheeks. Pangloss holds the view that, if God made the world, He must have created "the best of all possible worlds." "If this is the best of possible worlds," Voltaire wrote, "what then are the others." Finally Candide finds the pleasures of cultivating one's garden - Il faut cultiver notre jardin. Using the earthquake, Voltaire attacks the optimism of deists.

Candide's world is full of liars, traitors, ingrates, thieves, misers, killers, fanatics, hypocrites, fools, and so on. However, Voltaire's outrage is not based on social criticism but on his ironic view of human nature. When Candide asks his friend Martin if he believes that men have always massacred one another, Martin points out that hawks eat pigeons. "Well," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character, why do you suppose that men have changed?"

Candide rejects the philosophy of his tutor, the unsuccessfully hanged Doctor Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.". Candide was partly inspired by the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Dr. Pangloss was allegedly a caricature of Gottfried Leibniz, but it is possible that the real model was Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), a French philosopher and scientist. The prolific writer produced a number of studies from the physics of Venus to the proof of the existence of God (in which he ridiculed Maupertuis' ideas.

Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique was burned with the young Chevalier de la Barre, who had neglected to take of his hat while passing a bridge, where a sacred statue was exposed. Later Voltaire introduced his dictionary as a dialogical book: its short, polemical articles were more useful when "the readers produce the other half." In "Essay on the Manner and Spirit of Nations", Voltaire presented the first modern comparative history of civilizations, including Asia. Later he returned to the Chinese philosophy is his dictionary, praising the teachings of Confucius: "What more beautiful rule of conduct has ever been given man since the world began? Let us admit that there has been no legislator more useful to the human race." (See entry for Weston La Barre.

Death

Interesting fabrications have occurred concerning Voltaire’s death. One is that in his last illness Voltaire sent for Dr. Tronchin. When the Doctor came, he found Voltaire in the greatest agony, exclaiming with the utmost horror, “I am abandoned by God and man.” He then supposedly said, “Doctor, I will give you half of what I am worth, if you will give me six months’ life.” The doctor answered, “Sir, you cannot live six weeks.” Voltaire replied, “Then I shall go to hell, and you will go with me!” and soon after expired.

Carlyle, the historian, relates the following: “Two days before that mournful death, M. l’Abbé Mignot, his nephew, went to seek the Curé of St. Sulpice and the Abbé Gautier, and brought them into his uncle’s sick room; who, on being informed that the Abbé Gautier was there, ‘Ah, well!’ said be, ‘give him my compliments and my thanks.’ The Abbé spoke some words to him, exhorting him to patience. The Curé of St. Sulpice then came forward, having announced himself, and asked of M. de Voltaire, elevating his voice, if he acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ? The sick man pushed one of his hands against the Curé’s calotte (coif), shoving him back, and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, ‘Let me die in peace (Laissez-moi mourir en paix).’ The Curé seemingly considered his person soiled, and his coif dishonored, by the touch of the philosopher. He made the sicknurse give him a little brushing, and then went out with the Abbé Gautier.”

However, the Columbia Encyclopedia has a different account:

• In 1778, his 84th year, Voltaire attended the first performance of his tragedy, Irène, in Paris. His journey and his reception were a triumph and apotheosis, but the emotion was too much for him and he died of uremia in Paris soon afterward. In order to obtain Christian burial he signed a partial retraction of his writings. This was considered insufficient by the church, but he refused to sign a more general retraction. To a friend he gave the following written declaration, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting persecution.”

“Contrary to Catholic libels,” wrote Joseph McCabe, “he died peacefully (at 27 Rue des Sts.-Pères, near 1 Quai Voltaire), and he courteously declined to see the priest who wanted to be present.” Richard Holmes described the end as follows:

• Voltaire was exhausted, and in the privacy of his bedroom spitting blood. He died in much pain on May 30, 1778. He had received a Jesuit priest in his dying hours, whom he seems to have teased, as in the old days: on being urged to renounce the devil, Voltaire gently replied, “This is no time for making new enemies.” But to the relief of Enlightenment Europe, he refused to renounce any of his works.

An abbot secretly conveyed Voltaire’s corpse to an abbey in Champagne, where he was buried in ‘unholy ground’ but given Christian burial. His remains were brought back to Paris during the Revolution in 1791 and buried in the Panthéon. Carlyle’s description was as follows:

• He expired about a quarter past eleven at night, with the most perfect tranquillity, after having suffered the cruelest pains in consequence of those fatal drugs, which his own imprudence, and especially that of the persons who should have looked to it, made him swallow. Ten minutes before his last breath he took the hand of Morand, his valet-de-chambre, who was, watching him; pressed it, and said, “Adieu, mon cher Morand, je me meurs (Adieu, my dear Morand, I am gone).” These are the last words uttered by M. de Voltaire.

Sir Charles Morgan published further details, using extracts from a letter by Dr. Burard who, as assistant physician, was with Voltaire in his last moments:

• I feel happy in being able, while paying homage to truth, to destroy the effects of the lying stories which have been told respecting the last moments of M. de Voltaire. I was, by office, one of those who were appointed to watch the whole progress of his illness, with M. M. Tronchin, Lorry, and Try, his medical attendants. I never left him for an instant during his last moments, and I can certify that we invariably observed in him the same strength of character, though his disease was necessarily attended with horrible pain. (Here follow the details of his case.) We positively forbade him to speak in order to prevent the increase of a spitting of blood, with which he was attacked; still he continued to communicate with us by means of little cards, on which he wrote his questions; we replied to him verbally, and if he was not satisfied, he always made his observations to us in writing. He therefore retained his faculties up to the last moment, and the fooleries which have been attributed to him are deserving of the greatest contempt. It could not even be said that such or such person had related any circumstance of his death as being witness to it; for at the last, admission to his chamber was forbidden to any person. Those who came to obtain intelligence respecting the patient, waited in the saloon, and other apartments at hand. The proposition, therefore, which has been put in the mouth of Marshal Richelieu is as unfounded as the rest.

Further proof that Voltaire made no recantation, according to George William Foote, lies in the fact that the Bishop of Troyes sent a peremptory dispatch to the Prior of Scellieres, which lay in his diocese, forbidding him to inter the heretic’s remains. The dispatch, however, arrived too late, and Voltaire’s ashes remained there until 1791, when they were removed to Paris and placed in the Pantheon, by order of the National Assembly. Foote insists that Voltaire made no recantation and refused to utter or sign a confession of faith. With the connivance of his nephew, in fact, he tricked the Church into granting him a decent burial, not choosing to be flung into a ditch or buried like a dog. His heresy was never seriously questioned at the time, and the clergy actually clamored for the expulsion of the Prior, who had allowed his body to be interred in a church vault. Another slander appears to emanate from the Abbé Barruel, who was so well informed about Voltaire that he called him “the dying Atheist,” when, as was known at the time, he was a Deist.

In the 1860s when Voltaire’s tomb was opened in the 1860s, Voltaire was no longer there. Fanatics had pillaged his grave, throwing the remains onto a rubbish heap. His brain, kept in a jar and sold at auction to an unknown buyer, remains somewhere. His heart, bequeathed by the third marquis de Villette to the bishop of Orléans, who sold it to Napoleon III, who gave it to the National Library in Paris, remains in the National Library in Paris.

Voltaire Society of America

The Voltaire Society of America Inc. is at 477 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022 (212) 682-8811. In 2007, its officers were as follows:

President (2000-2006) - Dr. J. Patrick Lee <mailto:jplee@mail.barry.edu>

Vice President - Dr. John R. Iverson

Secretary-Treasurer - Garry Apgar <mailto:garryapgar@optonline.net>

Directors

George W. Gowen, Chairman

Katrina de Carbonnel

Irene Finel Honigman

Laurence A. Jarvik

Jeffrey W. Merrick

Harry Stein

Advisory Board

David B. Bouk, Alexandria, Virginia

Andrew Brown, Director, Centre International d'Étude du Dix-huitième Siecle, Ferney-Voltaire, France

Nicholas Cronk, Director, Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, England

Alden Gordon, Department of Fine Arts, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Beverly Schreider Jacob, Art historian and consultant, New York City

Honorary Directors

Lucien Choudin, President, Centre International d'Étude du Dix-huitième siecle, Ferney-Voltaire, France

Erica Delber-Pauli, Directrice administrative, Departement des affaires culturelle, Ville de Genéve, Switzerland

Jean Starobinski, Department de langue et literature francaises modernes, Université de Genéve, Switzerland

Georges Vianes, Mayor of Ferney-Voltaire, France

Map of Ferney-Voltaire

Ferney is a city in France - see the satellite view.

(See Norman L. Torrey’s article on Voltaire in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8. For samples of Voltaire’s wit and wisdom, see the entry for Vampires. Also, see Richard Holmes, “Voltaire’s Grin,” The New York Review of Books, 30 November 1995 - the extensive article includes Voltaire’s writing about priests of every denomination who “rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God.”)

(See entry for Gay Philosophers.)

(See a 2009 photo of Voltaire's gravesite.)

{CB; CE; CL; ER; EU, Paul Edwards; FO; FUK; HNS2; JMR; JMRH; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}