CHAPTER V.

THE CHURCH AND VOLTAIRE.


The enemies of the Church of France were many and bitter, but one man
stands out prominent among them. Voltaire was a poet, much admired in
his day, an industrious and talented historian, a writer on all sorts of
subjects, a wit of dazzling brilliancy; but he was first, last, and
always an enemy of the Catholic Church, and although not quite an
atheist, an opponent of all forms of religion. For more than forty years
he was the head of the party of the Philosophers. During all that time
he was the most conspicuous of literary Frenchmen. Two others, Rousseau
and Montesquieu, may rival him in influence on the modern world, but his
followers in the regions of thought are numerous and aggressive to-day.

Voltaire was born in 1694 the son of a lawyer named Arouet. There are
doubts as to the origin of the name he has made so famous; whether it
was derived from a fief possessed by his mother, or from an anagram of
AROUET LE JEUNE. At any rate, the name was adopted by the young poet, at
his own fancy, a case not without parallel in the eighteenth century.
[Footnote: As in the case of D'Alembert. For Voltaire's name, see
Desnoiresterres, _Jeunesse de Voltaire_, 161.]

Voltaire began early to attract public attention. Before he was
twenty-five years old he had established his reputation as a wit, had
spent nearly a year in the Bastille on a charge of writing satirical