Thanks are due to Dr Emmanuel Godin of the University of Portsmouth for drawing attention to the following Portsmouth scene in chapter 23 of Voltaire’s Candide:

‘“As they were chatting thus together they arrived at Portsmouth. The shore on each side the harbour was lined with a multitude of people, whose eyes were steadfastly fixed on a lusty man who was kneeling down on the deck of one of the men-of-war, with something tied before his eyes. Opposite to this personage stood four soldiers, each of whom shot three bullets into his skull, with all the composure imaginable; and when it was done, the whole company went away perfectly well satisfied.

“What the devil is all this for?” said Candide, “and what demon, or foe of mankind, lords it thus tyrannically over the world?”

He then asked who was that lusty man who had been sent out of the world with so much ceremony. When he received for answer, that it was an admiral.

“And pray why do you put your admiral to death?”

“Because he did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death. You must know, he had an engagement with a French admiral, and it has been proved against him that he was not near enough to his antagonist.”

“But,” replied Candide, “the French admiral must have been as far from him.”

“There is no doubt of that; but in this country it is found requisite, now and then, to put an admiral to death, in order to encourage the others to fight.”

Candide was so shocked at what he saw and heard, that he would not set foot on shore, but made a bargain with the Dutch skipper (were he even to rob him like the captain of Surinam) to carry him directly to Venice.

The skipper was ready in two days. They sailed along the coast of France, and passed within sight of Lisbon, at which Candide trembled. From thence they proceeded to the Straits, entered the Mediterranean, and at length arrived at Venice’.

François-Marie Arouet (b. 21 Nov. 1694, Paris; d. 30 May 1778, Paris), or Voltaire was a French Enlightenment author, philosopher, and historian famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, and for his support for freedom of speech and religion, and for the separation of church and state. Highly prolific, Voltaire wrote in a dazzling array of forms, including drama, essays, histories, novels, plays, poetry, and scientific works. He authored over 2,000 books and pamphlets, and was a prodigious correspondent. Amongst the first to achieve commercial success as an author, he gained a national and international reputation and was a significant and influential figure in the flowering of ideas in the pre-French revolutionary years. A polemicist of rare ability and considerable bravery, he was forthright in his sponsorship of civil liberties, and as a result was persistently a target of the Catholic French monarchy and its strict censorship policies.

Born into the lowest rank of the French nobility, Voltaire received a Jesuitical education. Sidestepping his father’s desire that he become a lawyer, the youthful Voltaire worked as a diplomat for a time but focused primarily on his writing career, as both poet and polemicist. In these years he was regularly imprisoned by the French authorities for his incendiary attacks on French institutions and government. Early plays included Oedipe (1718) and [Artémire](Art(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art%C3%A9mire_(tragedy)), and the epic poem La Henriade (1723) also dates from this period. After another imprisonment in 1726, Voltaire successfully petitioned to be exiled to Britain, where he lived primarily in Wandsworth. During this time he met John Gay, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and other leading cultural and political figures of the period. His works were highly esteemed in the UK. Returning to France two years later, Voltaire grew rich through business enterprises but continued his polemical career with Letters Concerning the English Nation (1734) in which his praise for England is used to attack French government and institutions in a similar manner to Alexis De Tocqueville’s later work Democracy in America (1835/1840). Voltaire’s book was publicly burnt and quickly suppressed, and Voltaire again fled Paris.

Largely avoiding such levels of confrontation in his subsequent work, Voltaire continued to write drama, scientific works, and essays, and spent the mid-1730s in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Prussia, and became acquainted with Frederick the Great. Voltaire’s time as one of Frederick’s Royal Chamberlain was tempestuous. By the 1750s Voltaire was briefly back in France before being banned from Paris and resident in Geneva and in the Ferney-Voltaire estate near the Swiss border. During this later period, Voltaire wrote his best-known work, the novel Candide, or Optimism (1759), a satire on Leibniz’s determinist philosophy. His final years were spent in Ferney, where his visitors included James Boswell, Giacomo Casanova, Edward Gibbon, and Adam Smith. 1764 saw the publication of the much-celebrated Dictionnaire Philosophique in which Voltaire’s radical views on a range of matters were still clearly in evidence.

At 83 years old, Voltaire returned to Paris in 1778 to see a performance of his final play, Irene, and died a few months later. He was refused Christian burial in Paris, but was secretly buried in the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne. During the French Revolution, in 1791, his remains were exhumed and moved to the Panthéon in Paris, where he was buried as a national hero whose influence on the Revolution was lauded. Voltaire’s enormous influence on literature, philosophy, history, and religion continues to the present day.