How Voltaire Caused a Revolution

These days, being successful as an author usually means an appearance on Oprah or selling movie rights to your work. In Voltaire's time, it meant being able to sanely express your views while in the midst of prison, or while exiled to a foreign country due to the controversy of works like Candide or Letters on the English. Nevertheless, despite such hardships, Voltaire is cited as being one of the main reasons why men were inspired to revolt against the king during the French Revolution. How & why did Voltaire cause this revolution on the basis of his words?

In his time, Voltaire was branded an antichrist by many of his critics. However, the reason why many of them spoke against him with such disdain was because he leveled this same criticism against the Pope. Cleverly, he infused his fictional work with his own views about the Catholic church, planting these words in the mouth of one of his characters: "Holy Father, you are an antichrist and this is how I prove it to Your Holiness. I call antichrist the man who does the contrary to what Christ did and commanded." However, his literature must be viewed within the context of the time in which he lived. While such criticisms will still offend many of today's readers, Voltaire's sentiments were popular with commoners of his time due to abuses occuring in the church & government.

Voltaire's warnings against the unchecked use & abuse of power are as pertinent today as when he wrote them prior to the French Revolution. When he was alive, he railed against the "divine right of kings", calling for a separation between church & state. Voltaire was openly critical of both the kings of his day as well as the Pope, citing that "The people, when reduced to despair, consider the divine rights of their chiefs as an abuse." His works continue to endure, due to the fact that both God & politics remain controversial issues.

Voltaire was no stranger to injustice. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille (a prison in Paris), both times at the whims of petty noblemen. The first time, he was imprisoned on the basis of insults to Phillippe II D'Orleans, and the second time for remark that he made to Chevalier de Rohan. Just as in his writings, Voltaire was outspoken in his criticism of the upper class and its ignorance to social inequities. His backstory lent a voice of authenticity to his politically-incorrect writings, cementing his influence as a pre-revolutionary writer.

After his 2nd stay in prison, Voltaire was released and exiled to England. Here, he met other important Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke & Isaac Newton. Each of these men questioned the active political and religious structures in Europe, and proposed new ways of looking at the world that would later heavily influence common men to incite the French Revolution. Thus, Voltaire's work suggested that peasants should be granted as much of a stake in their country's political future as any king or pope. A radical thought during his time, this signified early steps in a process of massive change.