Voltaire biography courtesy

Often at odds with French authorities over his politically and religiously charged works, he was twice imprisoned and spent many years in exile. He died shortly after returning to Paris in When Voltaire was just seven years old, his mother passed away. Following her death, he grew closer to his free-thinking godfather. Embracing Enlightenment philosophers such as Isaac NewtonJohn Locke and Francis BaconVoltaire found inspiration in their ideals of a free and liberal society, along with freedom of religion and free commerce.

Voltaire, in keeping with other Enlightenment thinkers of the era, was a deist — not by faith, according to him, but rather by reason. He looked favorably on religious tolerance, even though he could be severely critical towards Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As a vegetarian and an advocate of animal rights, however, Voltaire praised Hinduism, stating Hindus were "[a] peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves.

Voltaire wrote poetry and plays, as well as historical and philosophical works. His most well-known poetry includes The Henriade and The Maid of Orleanswhich he started writing in but never fully completed. Among the earliest of Voltaire's best-known plays is his adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipuswhich was first performed in Voltaire followed with a string of dramatic tragedies, including Mariamne The Scottish Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle argued that "Voltaire read history, not with the eye of devout seer or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti-catholic spectacles.

The town of Ferney, where Voltaire lived out the last 20 years of his life, was officially named Ferney-Voltaire in honor of its most famous resident, in A lateth-century industrial music group later adopted the same name. Astronomers have bestowed his name on the Voltaire crater on Deimos and the asteroid Voltaire. Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, drinking it at every turn: fifty times a day, according to Frederick the Great; three times a day, said Wagniere.

In the s, the bibliographer and translator Theodore Besterman started to collect, transcribe and publish all of Voltaire's writings. Voltaire wrote between fifty and sixty plays tragediesincluding a few unfinished ones. The complex soul of France seemed to have divided itself into these two men, so different and yet so French. Nietzsche speaks of " la gaya scienzathe light feet, wit, fire, grace, strong logic, arrogant intellectuality, the dance of the stars"—surely he was thinking of Voltaire.

Now beside Voltaire put Rousseau: all heat and fantasy, a man with noble and jejune visions, the idol of la bourgeois gentile-femmeannouncing like Pascal that the heart has its reason which the head can never understand. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. French writer, historian, and philosopher — For other uses, see Voltaire disambiguation. Portrait c. Fiction novella short story tragedy poetry. Non-fiction polemic treatise essay article historiography literary criticism epistle correspondence. Union for French Democracy.

Related topics. Religious and philosophical views. Main article: Mahomet play. Views on race and slavery. Appreciation and influence. Cartesian Empiricism. ISBN Both tombs were opened inand the remains were still there. An extract from the letter: 'The phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" which you have found in my book Voltaire in His Letters is my own expression and should not have been put in inverted commas.

Please accept my apologies for having, quite unintentionally, misled you into thinking I was quoting a sentence used by Voltaire or anyone else but myself. To believe certain commentators — Norbert Guterman, A Book of French Quotations— Hall was referencing back to a Voltaire letter of 6 February to an abbot le Riche where Voltaire supposedly said, "Reverend, I hate what you write, but I voltaire biography courtesy give my life so that you can continue to write.

You left, Sir, des Welches for des Welches. You will find everywhere barbarians obstinate. The number of wise will always be small. It is true It is necessary that the decent people stick together and stay under cover. There are no means that their small troop could tackle the party of the fanatics in open country. I was very sick, I was near death every winter; this is the reason, Sir, why I have answered you so late.

I am not less touched by it than your memory. Continue to me your friendship; it comforts me my evils and stupidities of the human genre. Receive my assurances, etc. Here is what he writes in his "Atheism" article in the Dictionnaire philosophique : "Aristophanes this man that the commentators admire because he was Greek, not thinking that Socrates was Greek alsoAristophanes was the first who accustomed the Athenians to consider Socrates an atheist.

The tanners, the voltaire biographies courtesy and the dressmakers of Athens applauded a joke in which one represented Socrates raised in the air in a basket, announcing there was God, and praising himself to have stolen a coat by teaching philosophy. A whole people, whose bad government authorized such infamous licences, deserved well what it got, to become the slave of the Romans, and today of the Turks.

Falconet, dated 15 February Pile assumptions on assumptions; accumulate wars on wars; make interminable disturbances succeed to interminable voltaire biographies courtesy let the universe be inundated by a general spirit of confusion; and it would take a hundred thousand years for the works and the name of Voltaire to be lost. Bigots and tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailings and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name.

Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Collins English Dictionary. Retrieved 1 August Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 22 March Biography Online. Retrieved 27 June Wondrium Daily. Archived from the original on 27 June Books and Writers kirjasto. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 17 February Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer. Electronic Enlightenment. Robert McNamee et al. University of Oxford. ISBN X. Retrieved 3 August The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 10 January The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Retrieved 5 May The Newton Wars. U of Chicago Press.

Voltaire: A Life. Profile Books, London. University of Chicago Press. Retrieved 22 June Archived from the original on 6 November Retrieved 5 November A History of Astronomy. Voltaire in Exile. Grove Press. Gallica in French. Retrieved 6 May Pottle, Frederick A. Boswell on the grand tour : Germany and Switzerland, Yale editions of the private papers of James Boswell.

New York: McGraw-Hill. OCLC Retrieved 30 June Skyhorse Publishing Inc. Archived from the original on 12 January Family Security Matters. Archived from the original on 8 August Retrieved 25 June Teach What You Believe. Paulist Press. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol 2. History and Theory. ISSN JSTOR Political Science Quarterly.

A History of the Modern World. McGraw-Hill, Inc. New York: Oxford University Press. Forum for Modern Language Studies. Court of the University of St Andrews: Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. New York: Random House. Archived from the original on 8 June Dugdale, A Philosophical Dictionary ver 2, p. Retrieved 31 October Retrieved 12 August Church History Hypatia: the life and legend of an ancient philosopher.

Oxford University Press, Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture. Greenwood Publishing Group. Faith, Rationality and the Passions. The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire. Cambridge University Press. Florida Voltaire and the Socinians "Voltaire from his very first writings on the subject of religion showed a libertine scorn of scripture, which he never lost.

This set him apart from Socinianism even though he admired the simplicity of Socinian theology as well as their Princeton University Press. Il extrait quelques paroles de divers endroits de l'Alcoran, dont il admire le Sublime. The Cambridge Companion to Mozart. Cambridge Companions to Music. The Dublin Review.

Voltaire biography courtesy

Burns, Oates and Washbourne: History of the Church of Christ. His hatred of religion increased with the passage of years. Why the Jews? He sought to defend freedom of religious and political thought and played a major role in the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing more than 20, letters and over 2, books and pamphlets.

Despite strict censorship laws, he frequently risked large penalties by breaking them and questioning the establishment. His father tried to encourage Voltaire to become a lawyer, but Voltaire was more interested in becoming a writer. Instead of studying to be a lawyer, he began writing poetry and mild criticisms of the church and state.

His humorous, satirical writing made him popular with sections of Paris society, though they also started attracting the attention of the censors. Inhe was exiled to England after being involved in a scuffle with a French nobleman. The nobleman used his wealth to have him arrested, and this would cause Voltaire to try and reform the French judicial system.

After this first imprisonment in the Bastilles, he changed his name to Voltaire — signifying his departure from his past. He also used numerous other pen names throughout the course of his life, in a bid to escape censorship. Voltaire spent three years in England, where he was influenced by British writers, such as William Shakespeare and also the different political system, which saw a constitutional monarchy rather than an absolute monarchy as in France.

He also learnt from great scientists, such as Sir Isaac Newton. Voltaire was particularly impressed by the Scottish Enlightenment voltaire biographies courtesy, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, saying once:. Although he had much in common with fellow French Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseauthe pair often disagreed and had a prickly relationship.

On returning to France, he wrote letters praising the British system of government and their greater respect for freedom of speech. The range of his writing is immense, embracing virtually every genre. It is above all the prose works with which modern readers are familiar, and again the writings cover a wide spectrum: histories, polemical satires, pamphlets of all types, dialogues, short fictions or contesand letters both real and fictive.

The conspicuous absentee from this list is the novel, a genre which, like the prose drameVoltaire thought base and trivial. Yet this would also be a simplification, for notwithstanding his apparent literary conservatism, Voltaire was in fact a relentless reformer and experimenter with literary genres, innovative almost despite himself, particularly in the domain of prose.

Although he never turned his back on verse drama and philosophical poetry, he experimented with different forms of historical writing and tried his hand at different styles of prose fiction. All his life, Voltaire loved to act in his own plays, and this fondness for role-playing carried through into all his writings. He used something like different pseudonyms in the course of his career, and his writing is characterized by a proliferation of different personae and voices.

The reader is constantly drawn into dialogue — by a footnote which contradicts the text, or by one voice in the text which argues against another. In fact we rarely know with certainty what Voltaire truly thought or believed; what mattered to him was the impact of what he wrote. The great crusades of the s taught him to appreciate the importance of public opinion, and in popularizing the clandestine ideas of the early part of the century he played the role of the journalist.

He may have been old-fashioned in his nostalgia for the classicism of the previous century, but he was wholly of his day in his consummate understanding of the medium of publishing.