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I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it. When I hear that statement, I automatically think of The Freedom of Speech an idea America was based on. However, that quote is not at all American, it was taken from Voltaire, a French philosopher whos thoughts changed the world as we know it. In fact, Victor Hugo said that the name Voltaire was to characterize the entire eighteenth century. For just as surely as the geological periods in the earth's history have left their stratified imprint on the earth's formation, so the work and influence of Voltaire are unmistakably impressed upon the progress and intellectual development of mankind. One of the most important days in the history of mankind was November 20, 1694, when Francois Marie About was born to humble parents as a puny, sickly, ugly child.
This anemic and cynically faced individual made the time in which he lived momentous (10). Before he was ten years old, it was plain that the young Voltaire had a clever mind. At that age he was sent to a boys's chool in France. His body was lean and thin and his mind was keen and active, and neither his body nor his mind changed these characteristics to the day of his death. At the school he says he learned "Latin and nonsense, " and nothing else. Voltaire was not like the other boys.
He did not care for games or sports. While the other children were busy with youthful games he was talking with the fathers, who were the teachers in the school. He turned his eyes to his professors and said, "Everyone must jump after his own fashion. " This was an idea Voltaire always carried with him his entire life (28). At the age of fifteen, his father decided to make him an advocate.
He picked out the profession for his son, because it was his own; but Voltaire's early efforts at poetry had given him the ambition to write and he insisted that he should not follow his father's footsteps, but devote his life to literature. "Literature, " said the parent, "is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society, and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger. " Bur even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law. While he was studying law, he was writing verses: verses that were wicked, sacrilegious, and sometimes malicious. He was also making up for the play he missed in youth and was having a gay time with his friends. "Tell my father, " was the answer, "I do not want any place that can be bought. I will make one for myself that will cost nothing. When nature takes it into her head to make a man, she fits him with her own equipment and educates him in her own school.
Shortly after, in Holland, Voltaire fell in love. He was forbidden to see his mistress. After various difficulties in meeting, she wisely concluded that the chances were so uncertain she had better take someone else. Naturally this serious matter made a deep impression on a boy. He concluded there was nothing to live for and turned more deliberately to literature for consolation. He went seriously to work and never stopped until he died at eighty-four (31).
At the time when Voltaire was young the French people were in a very poor condition. No one did anything to make their life better because they were forced to believe that what ever was happening was a part of Gods plan and they couldnt do anything about it (11). France needed someone to change things. Voltaire knew that the world could be less bad if people would replace ignorance and superstition with knowledge and rational thought (6). Voltaire's writings brought him fame and fortune, but, like those of his character Micromegas, also brought trouble.
His advocacy of freedom of speech and religion, along with attacks on the Church and the French nobility, resulted in two prison terms in the Bastille and years of exile from France (14). It was while in prison that he changed his name from the one his father gave him to the one he has made famous throughout all time, Voltaire. He said, "I was very unlucky under my first name. I want to see if this one will succeed any better. " There was no field of literature that was not open to Voltaire.
He was a poet, an essayist, a writer of plays, a historian, a novelist, a scientist, and a philosopher. He tried them all and excelled in all. His histories were as brilliant as his plays. He understood, as well as any man who ever lived, the difficulty that besets the author who would write history. "Whoso writes a history of his own times, " he says, "must be expected to be blamed for everything he has said and everything he has not said. " Voltaire was never afraid to say too much (19). When Voltaire was twenty-four, his first play, Oedipe, was produced in Paris. His verses and epigrams had already made him famous throughout the capital and a packed house made up of the intellectual and important people of Paris greeted the play with wild enthusiasm (20).
Later Voltaire set to work to write another play and to organize a company to act it. During all his life he was passionately fond of the stage, writing plays on every subject, ancient and modern, plays which always held keen thrusts against the injustice of the world. He was busy organizing companies to produce his plays, constantly associated with actors; in his later years he built a theater of his own at Ferry and frequently took part on the stage in his own plays. At the age of 65, Candide was published. Voltaire wrote many books, but this was his best know work. It is a brilliant philosophical tale that on the surface describes the adventures of an inexperienced young man as he wanders around the world.
Philosophically, Candide is recognized as a complex inquiry into the nature of good and evil (5). Im not sure if Voltaires work ever declined; it seems to me that his entire life was his climax. Until he died he never once hesitated to make things, that were formally held sacred, look ridiculous merely by making a comparison. To him time was the most precious thing in the world. He could not bear to see a single golden moment wasted while heartlessness and ignorance was all around him. Therefore, he didnt stop until he died (32).
Voltaire was the first individual that wasnt scared to give his thought on the powerful people of Europe and their thoughts on god. Voltaire wasnt scared to proclaim that he thought Jesus Christ had committed suicide. Most people would be scared to say those words today, but Voltaire declared it boldly in the eighteen hundreds (21). Some one who followed in Voltaires ideas was Friedrich Nietzsche. Voltaire encouraged people to think for themselves and do what they thought was right, not what the priests told them was right. Nietzsche did just that.
He rejected the idea of universal, unchanging truths. He viewed truths as mere human creations, as metaphors mistaken for objective reality. Therefore, Nietzsche showed that, since God is dead, universal truth, like absolute moral values, is dead as well (31). Voltaire appeared in an age in which he found the most important duty in life was the Will to Believe. His philosophy, on the contrary, was the Courage to Doubt, to investigate and to understand. For hundreds of years the church, taking the Genesis story seriously, taught, and the people believed, that woman had one more rib than man.
Voltaire questioned the infallibility of the church, and counted them. That sacred truth is no longer taught! Now that is influencing society (34). You can see the influence of Voltaire on mankind simply by examining the way you, yourself think. How many times has someone told you to think for yourself? How many people do you know who arent scared to crisis their preacher?
The number of simple ways Voltaire influenced the world is universal and uncountable. It is hardly necessary to sum up Voltaire. Born in a day of gross superstition, brutal barbarism, the densest bigotry and faith, he wrote his first play at the age of eighteen, and finished his last just before his death at eighty-four. During all this sixty-six years he worked unceasingly, dealing telling, deadly blows at the superstitions that held the minds of men. He died on the morning of the French Revolution, a revolution which more than any other man Voltaire inspired. There arent very many soul individuals who were responsible for wars.
Had he lived a few years longer most likely Voltaire would have died on the guillotine with many other victims of that delirious spasm of liberty that burned through France, and prepared the soil for a civilization and tolerance far greater than the world had.
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