EDITOR’S PREFACE

François Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694 and was educated at the Jesuit College de Louis-le-Grand. When he was 23 he spent a year in prison for allegedly being the author of insults against Philippe II, Regent of France. It was at this time that he began to call himself Voltaire and that he seriously embarked upon his career as a writer and thinker.

His first important work, Oedipe, won him immediate fame as well as a pension from the government. Aside from his artistic ability, he also functioned shrewdly as a businessman and managed to accumulate a sizable fortune while still in his twenties. During this time he gained several enemies, and in 1726 found himself again in the Bastille on trumped-up charges. He was released shortly thereafter on his promise that he would leave France. Thus, thoroughly disenchanted with the machinations of French justice, toward whose reform he devoted himself for the rest of his life, he journeyed to England. He spent two years there, made many literary friends and came under the influence of the work of Newton and Locke.

He returned to France in 1729 and, deeply impressed with the comparative freedom of thought and expression that existed in England, quickly became a national figure through his own writings.

After a long correspondence with Frederick II, Emperor of Prussia, Voltaire went to Berlin to take up residence at Frederick’s court. He lived there until 1753 when, after a falling out with the Prussian ruler, he was forced to flee to Switzerland. In Geneva he solidified his position as a dramatist of the first rank and continued to write in just about every area of human life, with special emphasis on history, science, law and religion. In 1759 he composed his most memorable work, Candide, a masterpiece of dramatic style and philosophical insight.

Undoubtedly the most active man of his era, Voltaire dipped his mind into practically every field of human experience and became one of the most powerful men of all time. He died in Paris at the age of 84.

This volume, The Philosophy of History, was first published in London in 1766 and is a typical representation of Voltaire’s attitude toward life and reality. His prime concern was to disprove and demolish the established notions that governed contemporary affairs but which were, in his penetrating view, patently ridiculous. He spread this iconoclastic aim through all his work. The model for all subsequent dissenters, he wrote with courage and conviction, and most important of all, with a controlled genius that lent to his words and ideas a strength and aggregate that has successfully resisted the erosive influence of time.

THOMAS KIERNAN