Voltaire never took an IQ test. The ≈190 is Catharine Cox's 1926 estimate, helped by his unusually well-documented Jesuit schooling at the Collège Louis-le-Grand — a retrospective inference, not a measurement.
84 years, mostly away from Paris
Prison, exile and refuge shaped almost everything he wrote. Tap a stretch of his life.
Twenty years running his own small estate: watchmaking, silk, housing for refugees, 200+ letters a month — and Candide.
Education, in sealed letters
He wrote more than 20,000 letters. Here his schooling is told as a short correspondence — from the Jesuits who trained him to the law career he refused.
Seven years with the Jesuits: Latin, Greek, rhetoric and theatre. He learned to argue — and to distrust the Church that taught him.
Classmates included the d'Argenson brothers, later ministers who protected him for decades.
His freethinking godfather introduced him to the libertine Société du Temple while still a boy.
Enrolled to please his father, a notary; he spent the time writing verse instead.
Sent as a secretary to the French ambassador, recalled over a love affair, then placed as a law clerk — the last attempt to make him a lawyer.
England, and a book they burned
After a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot — insult, retort, a beating by hired men, a challenge to a duel — the Rohans had him locked up again, then exiled. In England he met constitutional monarchy, religious toleration, Newton and Locke, and learned English well enough to read them.
His Lettres philosophiques (1734) compared English and French institutions — a thin disguise for an attack on absolutism. The Paris parlement had it burned. He fled to Cirey.
His most scientific years were spent with Émilie du Châtelet, a mathematician and physicist more rigorous than he was. Together they worked on Newtonian physics; her French translation of Newton's Principia, with commentary, is still the standard one. Voltaire also wrote the Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations, a pioneering comparative history.
Three years to clear a dead man's name
Jean Calas, a Protestant in Toulouse, was executed in 1762 for the murder of a son who had in fact taken his own life. From Ferney, Voltaire investigated, published and rallied opinion until the verdict fell. The campaign made him Europe's leading voice for toleration.
Similar campaigns followed for the Sirven family and the Chevalier de la Barre. The Treatise on Tolerance (1763) and the pocket-sized Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), designed to be passed hand to hand, became founding texts of European secularism. Candide (1759) came from the same desk.
Two thousand works, six genres
His collected works run to about 200 volumes. Beyond the books already covered above, these are the landmarks of each genre.
Did Voltaire actually say it?
Few writers are misquoted as often. Tap a card for the verdict.
Back in Paris after 28 years for his last play, Irène, he was cheered at the Académie. He died on May 30, aged 83, and was refused burial in consecrated ground in Paris.
After the Revolution his remains were brought back to Paris and placed in the Panthéon.
Timeline
Reading the ≈190
Cox's method rewards the kind of structured childhood evidence a Jesuit school produces, and underrates people with thinner records. Read the figure as a historical artifact.
Sources
- Cox, C. M. (1926). The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses
- Voltaire (1759). Candide
- Voltaire (1764). Dictionnaire philosophique
- Voltaire (1763). Traité sur la tolérance
- Pomeau, R. (1985–1994). Voltaire en son temps
- Besterman, T. (ed.) — Voltaire correspondence (51 vols.)
- Hall, E. B. (1906). The Friends of Voltaire
- Mason, H. (1981). Voltaire: A Biography. Granada