Voltaire's Later Life and Works
In January 1755, after a period of wandering, Voltaire acquired a property in Geneva which he called "Les Délices". A new and more settled phase now began as, at the age of sixty-one, he became master of his own house for the first time: in a letter of March that year, he wrote that "I am finally leading the life of a patriarch". The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 may have disturbed his philosophical certainties and caused him to doubt the Leibnizian Optimism which Alexander Pope had helped to popularize, but it did not disturb his new-found personal happiness. His Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne appeared within weeks of the earthquake, and it is revealing that his instant literary response should have been in verse. His prose response to the catastrophe, in Candide, took longer to mature and was published in 1759. In the meantime, he had written articles for the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, and in 1756 he published his universal history, the Essai sur les moeurs.
In 1757, d'Alembert's critical article "Genève" in the Encyclopédie had provoked a scandal in that city. Geneva turned out not to be the model republic that Voltaire had imagined or hoped it was, and after a number of tussles with clerical authority, he resolved to leave the city. A return to Paris would not have been welcomed by the government, so he purchased a house and estate at Ferney, where he installed himself in 1760 - on French soil now, but within striking distance of the border. It was in this symbolically marginal position that Voltaire was to live for the rest of his life. Henceforth he would play the part of the seigneur, caring for his estate and even building a church for the villagers: it bears the deist (and immodest) inscription Deo erexit Voltaire ("Voltaire erected [this] to God"). But this new-found role did not mean that, like Candide, Voltaire had found happiness in cultivating his garden and in ignoring the world beyond. On the contrary, it was in 1760 that Voltaire first issued the rallying cry with which he would henceforth sign many of his letters: Ecrasons l'Infâme ("Let's crush the infamous"). The stability of his base at Ferney seems to have given Voltaire the opportunity over the following years to launch and encourage the campaigns which soon made him the most famous writer in Europe.
The Calas affair was a defining moment in this crusade for tolerance. The Huguenot Jean Calas was tortured and broken on the wheel in 1762 after being found guilty, on the basis of dubious evidence, of murdering his son. Voltaire successfully led a determined campaign to clear Calas's name, writing many letters and publishing a number of works, including Traité sur la tolérance (1763). Other campaigns followed - a successful one to obtain the rehabilitation of another Huguenot family, the Sirvens, accused of having murdered a daughter recently converted to Catholicism, and an unsuccessful one to achieve a pardon for a nineteen-year-old man, La Barre, condemned to be burned at the stake for having committed certain trivial acts of sacrilege (and for having in his possession a copy of Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique). These struggles brought Voltaire to even greater public prominence, and it in no way diminishes his undoubted determination and courage to say that he obviously relished his new role: in a letter of 1766, he wrote to a friend "Oh how I love this philosophy of action and goodwill".
Although many of Voltaire's later writings concerned his crusade for tolerance and justice, he continued, to write in a wide variety of forms, from tragedy to biblical criticism, and from satire to short fiction (L'Ingénu, 1767; Le Taureau blanc, 1773). In February 1778, Voltaire was persuaded by his friends to make a symbolic return to Paris, ostensibly to oversee preparations to stage his latest tragedy, Irène. It was the first time he had set foot in the capital since 1750, and he was received in triumph. A succession of friends called on him, and despite his deteriorating health, he attended a performance of his new play at the Comédie Française, in the course of which his bust was crowned on stage with a laurel wreath. His health did not permit his to return to Ferney, and he died in Paris two months later. Even in death, Voltaire, a celebrated amateur actor, seemed to have stage-managed his departure from the scene so as to gain maximum publicity.