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On 28 March 1727, Voltaire, already at thirty-three a notorious playwright, sometime royal favourite, sometime dissident, now exiled in London, attended the funeral of Isaac Newton. It was a seminal moment. Already convinced that Britain’s mixed constitution was superior to French absolutism and an admirer of Newtonian science, Voltaire interviewed Newton’s doctors, fascinated to discover that the scientist had died a virgin but also to hear from his niece that his theory of gravity originated in a falling apple. It was a passing of the baton: Voltaire saw himself as Newton’s heir.

Born François-Marie Arouet, the son of a lawyer, nicknamed Zozo in the family, Voltaire refused to study law and wrote poetry instead. When his father sent him to work for the French ambassador to Holland, his affair with a teenage girl known as Pimpette got him sacked just as his poem on the French regent’s incest with his daughter got him imprisoned in the Bastille. Later his cheek to an aristocrat got him beaten up and imprisoned again. Returning from England, he joined a consortium that bought up the state lottery, making a fortune. Next he fell in love with a talented, beautiful, younger writer, Émilie, marquise du Châtelet, and settled (with her husband’s permission) at her chateau where they wrote philosophy, history, fiction and science^* – she translated Newton, he popularized Newton; and she was the first woman to have a paper published by the French Academy. Later they each took other lovers – he fell in lust with his niece – but remained partners until she died in childbirth.

In 1734, his Lettres philosophiques, arguing for religious and political tolerance, won European fame, but it was just the start of his campaign against superstition that he later expressed in a slogan: ‘Écrasez l’infâme’. It was the unjust torture and execution of a wrongly convicted Protestant, Jean Calas, much later in 1762 that inspired his most famous campaign. He believed in human progress, but not too much: Voltaire mocked foolish optimism with his character Pangloss in Candide. He criticized all religions – Christians, Jews and Muslims – mocking priests who ‘rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God’. But he joked, ‘There’s no God, but don’t tell that to my servant lest he murder me at night.’

Voltaire was the first of the philosophes, who advocated a new, sceptical, rational, scientific, tolerant state of mind that sought the greatest happiness for mankind and challenged blind faith and sacred monarchy. If we choose to worship God, argued Immanuel Kant, the German philosophe of Königsberg later in the century, ‘we finite creatures can never understand the infinite nature of reality’. Kant summed up the Enlightened spirit in two words: Sapere aude! – Dare to use your own intellect!

Voltaire, who was richer and more famous than his cohorts, being an adept financier in addition to all his other talents, played the role of protector: when a young, poor writer got into trouble, Voltaire intervened. Denis Diderot, son of a provincial cutler who cut him off when he refused to enter the priesthood, was a messy, mischievous, manic force, curious about everything from hermaphroditism to acoustics, pouring out works that challenged royal and Catholic rule, love letters to his many paramours, novels and pornography: his Indiscreet Jewels, an erotic fantasia recounted by the vaginas of odalisques talking about a voyeuristic sultan, written to show how women enjoyed sex as much as men, got him arrested. Voltaire ensured Diderot’s release, after which he launched the work that came to define the new thinking, the Encyclopédie, featuring articles on every subject illuminated by this new Enlightenment.

Yet it was not the end of the old thought: there were still plenty of religious fanatics; some philosophes opposed slavery; some did not; few were even democrats. ‘Democracy,’ wrote Kant, ‘is a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which “all” decide for or against the “one” who does not.’ Most believed in mixed monarchies with reform from above but Voltaire wrote a biography of Peter the Great and encouraged ‘philosopher-kings’.