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Born François-Marie Arouet in 1694 in France, Voltaire wrote countless plays, poems, satires and polemics — his collected works take up 200 volumes — and centuries before there was a Madonna, Bono or Beyoncé, the one-named Voltaire was Europe's first truly modern celebrity.
- Enlightenment
When Voltaire returned to France enlivened by these fresh...
- Enlightenment
Francois Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a literary genius whose brilliant writings often caused extreme controversy during his time. His prolific writings often attacked popular philosophical or religious beliefs.
Voltaire is a radical, but his radical Enlightenment is not of the sort described by Jonathan Israel; and to understand that, we need to appreciate Voltaire’s style of authorship and its relationship to celebrity.
Feb 14, 2014 · While Voltaire remained a bachelor, Émilie had married at nineteen the dull and abiding Marquis du Châtelet, the perfect arrangement for one to conduct a necessary love affair. Mitford explains: Love, in France, is treated with formality; friends and relations are left in no doubt as to its beginning and its end.
- The Origins of His Famous Pen Name Are unclear.
- He Was Imprisoned in The Bastille For Nearly A year.
- He Became Hugely Wealthy by Exploiting A Flaw in The French Lottery.
- He Was An Extraordinary Prolific Writer.
- Many of His Most Famous Works Were banned.
- He Helped Popularize The Famous Tale About Sir Isaac Newton and The Apple.
- He Had A Brief Career as A Spy For The French Government.
- He Never Married Or Fathered children.
- He Set Up A Successful Watchmaking Business in His Old Age.
- He Continued Causing Controversy Even in death.
Voltaire had a strained relationship with his father, who discouraged his literary aspirations and tried to force him into a legal career. Possibly to show his rejection of his father’s values, he dropped his family name and adopted the nom de plume “Voltaire” upon completing his first play in 1718. Voltaire never explained the meaning of his pen n...
Voltaire’s caustic wit first got him into trouble with the authorities in May 1716, when he was briefly exiled from Paris for composing poems mocking the French regent’s family. The young writer was unable to bite his tongue, however, and only a year later he was arrested and confined to the Bastillefor writing scandalous verse implying the regent ...
In 1729, Voltaire teamed with mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine and others to exploit a lucrative loophole in the French national lottery. The government shelled out massive prizes for the contest each month, but an error in calculation meant that the payouts were larger than the value of all the tickets in circulation. With this in mind,...
Voltaire wrote more than 50 plays, dozens of treatises on science, politics and philosophy, and several books of history on everything from the Russian Empire to the French Parliament. Along the way, he also managed to squeeze in heaps of verse and a voluminous correspondence amounting to some 20,000 letters to friends and contemporaries. Voltaire ...
Since his writing denigrated everything from organized religion to the justice system, Voltaire ran up against frequent censorship from the French government. A good portion of his work was suppressed, and the authorities even ordered certain books to be burned by the state executioner. To combat the censors, Voltaire had much of his output printed...
Though the two never met in person, Voltaire was an enthusiastic acolyte of the English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Upon receiving a copy of Newton’s “Principia Mathematica,” he claimed he knelt down before it in reverence, “as was only right.” Voltaire played a key role in popularizing Newton’s ideas, and he offered one of the fi...
Voltaire struck up a lively correspondence with Frederick the Great in the late 1730s, and he later made several journeys to meet the Prussian monarch in person. Before one of these visits in 1743, Voltaire concocted an ill-advised scheme to use his new position to repair his reputation with the French court. After hatching a deal to serve as a gov...
While Voltaire technically died a bachelor, his personal life was a revolving door of mistresses, paramours and long-term lovers. He carried out a famous 16-year affair with the brilliant—and very married—author and scientist Émilie du Châtelet, and later had a committed, though secretive, partnership with his own niece, Marie-Louise Mignot. The tw...
While living in Ferney, France, in the 1770s, Voltaire joined with a group of Swiss horologists in starting a watchmaking business at his estate. With the septuagenarian Voltaire acting as manager and financier, the endeavor soon grew into a village-wide industry, and Ferney watches came to rival some of the best in Europe. “Our watches are very we...
Voltaire died in Paris in 1778, just a few months after returning to the city for the first time in 28 years to oversee the production of one of his plays. Over the last few days of his life, Catholic Church officials repeatedly visited Voltaire—a lifelong deist who was often critical of organized religion—in the hope of persuading him to retract h...
Aug 9, 2023 · Author of the satirical novella 'Candide,' Voltaire is widely considered one of France's greatest Enlightenment writers.
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Voltaire (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778) was a French writer, essayist, and philosopher – he was known for his wit, satire, and defence of civil liberties. He sought to defend freedom of religious and political thought and played a major role in the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century. “Love truth, but pardon error.” – Voltaire.
