If the name Voltaire is still synonymous with the fight for reason and freedom of expression, for religious tolerance and against fanaticism, it is because he was able to launch effective campaigns with his contacts throughout Europe during his lifetime.

There is hardly a story about the modern intellectual that would not begin with the affair surrounding Jean Calas, the cruelly executed Protestant whose widow and children Voltaire was finally able to free from the clutches of justice after years of tug-of-war.

But Voltaire's afterlife also had its ups and downs.

While the French Revolution included him in the pantheon as one of its great innovators, he was hated in the nineteenth century for precisely this reason.

The Church conjured up his specter by having reprints of counter-writings, which had already been hailed during his lifetime, in large numbers for decades.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary was also sent "The Errors of Voltaire" by the ex-Jesuit Claude-Adrien Nonnotte on behalf of her confessor.

Only the Third Republic made peace with the author again, for which his attacks on the power of the official church fit into their secular program.

So what could it mean when the historian Volker Reinhardt wants to “win back Voltaire for the present” in his comprehensive biography that is now available?

Fortunately, Reinhardt is not interested in a reinterpretation of the genre “What does Voltaire still have to say to us today”.

Rather, he wants to "show the historical Voltaire, that is, Voltaire in his time and in the confrontations with his time, behind all the striking appropriations and distortions".

Loans to cash-strapped princely houses

First of all, this means embracing a lifespan that is rightly known in France as the “Siècle de Voltaire”: Born in 1694, Voltaire lived to an unusual age for his time by the time he died in 1778.

He began his career as a celebrated playwright during the Régence, the decade after the death of Louis XIV. With the "Philosophical Letters" published in 1734, he drew the attention of Europe to modern England, which he celebrated as a model of freedom and tolerance.

When in the 1750s Diderot or Rousseau, who was a generation younger, tackled the Encyclopédie project and achieved their first literary successes, he was already a kind of intellectual elder statesman.

At the same time, the phase in his life that finally secured his posthumous fame began at this time.

In 1759 the short novel "Candide" was published, his most widely read work to date.

It marks the beginning of his fight against "infamy," a word he coined not just for the Church, but for all manner of superstition and abuse of power.

Even if he was threatened with further arrests for the rest of his life after two stays in the Bastille, Voltaire was able to afford this fight, at least on a material level.

He no longer had to live off the royalties from his theater performances or solicit patronage from the nobility.

He had cunningly bought up the tickets of a poorly constructed state lottery, the payout of which formed the basis of his fortune, and increased it with even more skill by investing in overseas trade and by lending to cash-strapped princely houses.

It remains a mystery how, in addition to the meticulous monitoring of his economic activities, he wrote an almost unmanageable work.

The database of the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford counts a total of fifteen million words, more than 21,000 letters are known,