CANDIDE François-marie Arouet (1694–1778), who later took the name ofVOLTAIRE , was the son of a notary and educated at a Jesuit School in Paris. His father wanted him to study the law, but the young man was determined on a literary career. He gained an introduction to the intellectual life of Paris and soon won a reputation as a writer of satires and odes – a not altogether enviable reputation, for the suspicion of having written a satire on the Regent procured him a term of imprisonment in the Bastille. On his release, his first tragedy,Œdipe, was performed (1718) in Paris with great success and soon after he published the poem he had written in prison, a national epic,La Henriade(1723), which placed him with Homer and Virgil in the eyes of his contemporaries. After a second term of imprisonment in the Bastille, Voltaire spent two and a half years (1726–8) in England, and returned to France full of enthusiasm for the intellectual activity and the more tolerant form of government he found there. His enthusiasm and his indictment of the French system of government are expressed in hisLetters Concerning the English Nation(1733), published in France as theLettres philosophiques, but whose sale was absolutely forbidden in France. The next fifteen years were spent at the country seat of his friend, Madame du Châtelet, where he wrote his most popular tragedies and his Zadig, a witty Eastern tale, and started work on hisCentury of Louis XIV. After Madame du Châtelet’s death in 1749, Voltaire was induced to pay a prolonged visit to the Court of Frederick the Great, with whom he had been in correspondence for several years. While there he completed his important historical workEssay on Customs(Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations) and began hisPhilosophical Dictionary. Voltaire and Frederick could not agree for long and in 1753 Voltaire decided to leave Prussia. But he was not safe in France. After two years of wandering he settled near Geneva and at last made a home at Ferney. It was during the last, and most brilliant, twenty years of his life that he wroteCandide, his dialogues and more tales, and published his widely readPhilosophical Dictionary(1764) in ‘pocket form’, while conducting his ceaseless and energetic attack against what he called the ‘infamous thing’ – all manifestations of tyranny and persecution by a privileged orthodoxy in Church and State. He died at
