The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Voltaire personified all the greatness and excesses of the Enlightenment, and he so successfully impressed Enlightenment thinking on the broader culture that, as Durant writes, “the battles which he fought for us no longer interest us intimately” (219). Relentlessly prolific and highly influential in his own lifetime, he championed a movement that helped shift power from hereditary and religious authority to a public faith in the power of human reason.

Imprisoned in the Bastille for offending the young Louis XV, Francois-Marie Arouet adopted the pen name Voltaire, and upon his release became a literary celebrity, especially for his plays. After a fight with a powerful aristocrat, he fled to England. This proved a more hospitable environment for writers, and his experience of their scientific progress and political liberty turned him against the “idle aristocracy and tithe-absorbing clergy of France” (228). Returning to his native country, he wrote his great Romantic novellas, which lampoon the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the pointless suffering that the higher classes inflict upon the lower.

In his story Zadig, the protagonist endures one tragic mishap after another, particularly because of love affairs, before becoming enslaved and offering the wisdom borne of his experiences to his master.