How Voltaire Used Direct Mail Advertising

Most of us know that Voltaire was one of the great names of French history, writer, philosopher, fighter for human rights and liberties; one of the great minds and characters of all history.

But probably few of us realize that he was also a business man of no small ability, and an advertising man of high success and accomplishments. Yet it is a fact.

When he was living at.Ferney he had an income equal to about $100,000_ a year in our money. Ferney was a miserable little village when Voltaire went there. The few hovels were wretched. and the marshy lands were unproductive. Voltaire reclaimed land, built houses, and established a weaving industry and a watch-making industry, both of which soon flourished under his touch of genius.

He gave sanctuary to some watch-makers driven from Geneva, and three years later he was exporting their wares to Spain, Italy, Algiers, Russia, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, China, and yes, America.

Tn 1773 he sold, 4,000 fine watches for more than half a million francs.

At the same time his weaving industry was selling stockings to the ladies of France. FIe created all this business through the writing of his marvelous letters. Not a letter on any subject left Ferney that did not mention the great products of the place.

Whether he wrote poetry, prose, the drama, the church, politics, he always inserted something about the watches dnd stockings they made in Ferney.

His direct mail letters brought responses and orders frofu much of the world, from the great and small alike. Catherine II of Russia ordered one thousand rubles worth of his watches at one time.

Letters from Voltaire and signed with his own hand went out by the thousand, and every letter mentioned watches or hosiery, or both. And thus the business grew. His personality-one of the admittedly most impressive personalities in all history-went into those letters. People took an interest in him, in his products, his ideas, his village, and the sage of Ferney.

He sent out no ordinary circular letters. Each one had something that the reader enjoyed, and remembered. And so thousands of them ordered his goods.

Thus one of the mightiest writers of all time, also proved himself to be an advertising man of genius.