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- Voltaire didn't invent the Enlightenment — he was the Enlightenment. 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.
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Voltaire used his celebrity persona as the brash, aggressive, provocateur to call out real violations of public trust by established institutions, particularly the Catholic Church and its undo influence on the state.
- Dave Roos
‘The celebrity’ looks at how Voltaire reached a broader public through the medium of publishing. Of all 18th-century thinkers , Voltaire was the most media savvy. His celebrity status meant that his books, and his message, reached ever wider audiences.
Jun 26, 2015 · It was precisely because Voltaire was well-known – because he had become a public figure – that the public was eager to stare at him even through the mediation of print, in the intimacy of his bedroom, performing ordinary activities.
For Voltaire, it was a decade of extreme contrasts shaped by his relationship with Frederick, a period of supreme, seemingly unassailable celebrity and of public humiliation, of independence and exile, of power and vulnerability.
Voltaire was also modern in the way he invented himself by fashioning a public image out of his adopted name. As the patriarch of Ferney, he turned himself into an institution whose fame reached across Europe.
May 28, 2009 · Voltaire's fame mixes literary celebrity, social critique and political controversy. Early in his career his public skirmishes with Church and government led to brief imprisonment in the Bastille and periods of exile from Paris, notably in England (1726-8).
Feb 23, 2017 · Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction explores Voltaire’s remarkable career, his most important works, and demonstrates how his thinking is pivotal to our notion and understanding of the Enlightenment. It examines the nature of Voltaire’s literary celebrity, demonstrating the extent to which his work was reactive and practical, and therefore ...
