V Voltaire François Quastana Centre d’Histoire judiciaire (UMR CNRS 8025), Université de Lille, Lille, France François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, a pen name which he coined for himself in 1718, was a key figure of the Enlightenment and clearly the most famous French writer of the eighteenth century. He occupies an unconventional place in the history of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. A champion of religious tolerance and freedom of speech, he was also an influential popularizer of legal reform. Modern critics have often underlined the weakness and the incoherence of Voltaire’ s philosophy. What kind of philosopher Voltaire was still remains a matter of controversy. Voltaire’ s legacy in the history of Western philosophy resides more in his social and political activism in favor of legal reform than in systematic philosophy, despite rare but interesting forays into the latter field. The most convenient way to shed light on Voltaire’ s legal, political, and philosophical thought is first to follow, step by step, the devel- opment of his career as a “philosophe” before focussing, more specifically, on his contribution to Legal and Social philosophy. Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694. He came from a middle-class Parisian legal family. His father was a notary before acquiring the venal office of “receveur des épices” at the Accounting Chambers. In his youth, from 1704 to 1711, he was educated by the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand. In order to fulfill his father ’ s wishes, he began to study law and became a lawyer ’ s apprentice. He soon gave up this career to follow his dream of becoming a playwright and emulating the princes of French classical tragedy, Corneille and Racine, as well as the greatest authors of Roman poetry, Horace and Virgil. It was probably in the years following the death of Louis XIV that Voltaire discovered natural philosophy and English freethinkers thanks to his contacts with the famous English aristocrat Henry St. John Bolingbroke who lived in exile in France during the period of the Regency gov- ernment (1715–1723). Nonetheless, it was during his own voluntary exile in England (1726–1729), brought about by his altercation with the Duc de Rohan, a young but powerful nobleman, that Voltaire’ s conversion to philosophy really began (Gay 1959). Moving first in Bolingbroke’ s circle of Tory intellectuals, he also frequented Whig circles and especially that of Samuel Clarke who introduced him to Newtonian philosophy. Originally entitled Letters on England, his famous Lettres philosophiques, published in 1734 after his return to France, were a product of this important period of Voltaire’ s life. © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 M. Sellers, S. Kirste (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_654-1