# data[].attributes.body
Shaped French government and his ideas ended up in the bill of rights.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Voltaire's Affect on Modern Western Society Essay - 960 Words | Bartleby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Free Essay: "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to death your right to say it," were the famous words of Fracois Marie Arouet, more...

# data[].attributes.body
Attacked the Aristocracy and the Church. Talks about the arrogance of nobility. Criticizes aspects of the philosophical movement of the enlightenment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A short Voltaire biography describes Voltaire's life, times, and work. Also explains the historical and literary context that influenced Candide.

# data[].attributes.body
Candide:

Letters Concerning The English Nation:

Essay On Epic Poetry:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1. The origins of his famous pen name are unclear.

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 name, so scholars can only speculate on its origins. The most popular theory maintains the name is an anagram of a certain Latinized spelling of "Arouet," but others have claimed it was a reference to the name of a family chateau or a nod to the nickname "volontaire" (volunteer), which Voltaire may have been given as a sarcastic reference to his stubbornness.

2. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year.

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 Bastille for writing scandalous verse implying the regent had an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

Voltaire boasted that his cell gave him some quiet time to think, and he eventually did 11 months behind bars before winning a release. He later endured another short stint in the Bastille in April 1726, when he was arrested for planning to duel an aristocrat that had insulted and beaten him. To escape further jail time, he voluntarily exiled himself to England, where he remained for nearly three years.

3. He became hugely wealthy by exploiting a flaw in the French lottery.

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, La Condamine and a syndicate of other gamblers were able to repeatedly corner the market and rake in massive winnings.

The scheme left Voltaire with a windfall of nearly half a million francs, setting him up for life and allowing him to devote himself solely to his literary career.

4. He was an extraordinary prolific writer.

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 supposedly kept up his prodigious output by spending up to 18 hours a day writing or dictating to secretaries, often while still in bed. He may have also been fueled by heroic amounts of caffeine-according to some sources, he drank as many as 40 cups a day.

5. Many of his most famous works were banned.

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 abroad, and he published under a veil of assumed names and pseudonyms. His famous novella "Candide" was originally attributed to a "Dr. Ralph," and he actively tried to distance himself from it for several years after both the government and the church condemned it.

Despite his best attempts to remain anonymous, Voltaire lived in almost constant fear of arrest. He was forced to flee to the French countryside after his "Letters Concerning the English Nation" was released in 1734, and he went on to spend the majority of his later life in unofficial exile in Switzerland.

6. He helped popularize the famous tale about Sir Isaac Newton and the apple.

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 first accounts of how the famed scientist developed his theories on gravity. In his 1727 "Essay on Epic Poetry," Voltaire wrote that Newton "had the first thought of his System of Gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."

Voltaire wasn't the original source for the story of the "Eureka!" moment, as has often been claimed, but his account was instrumental in making it a fabled part of Newton's biography.

7. He had a brief career as a spy for the French government.

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 government informant, he wrote several letters to the French giving inside dope on Frederick's foreign policy and finances.

Voltaire proved a lousy spy, however, and his plan quickly fell apart after Frederick grew suspicious of his motives. The two nevertheless remained close friends-some have even claimed they were lovers-and Voltaire later moved to Prussia in 1750 to take a permanent position in the Frederick's court. Their relationship finally soured in 1752, after Voltaire made a series of scathing attacks on the head of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Frederick responded by lambasting Voltaire, and ordered that a satirical pamphlet he had written be publicly burned. Voltaire left the court for good in 1753, supposedly telling a friend, "I was enthusiastic about [Frederick] for 16 years, but he has cured me of this long illness."

8. He never married or fathered children.

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 two lived as a married couple from the early 1750s until his death, and they even adopted a child in 1760, when they took in a destitute young woman named Marie- Françoise Corneille. Voltaire later paid the dowry for Corneille's marriage, and often referred to Mignot and himself as her "parents."

9. He set up a successful watchmaking business in his old age.

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 well made," he once wrote to the French ambassador to the Vatican, "very handsome, very good and cheap."

Voltaire saw the enterprise as a way to prop up the Ferney economy, and he used his vast network of upper class contacts to find prospective buyers. Among others, he eventually succeeded in peddling his wares to the likes of Catherine the Great of Russia and King Louis XV of France.

10. He continued causing controversy even in death.

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 his opinions and make a deathbed confession. The great writer was unmoved, and supposedly brushed off the priests by saying, "let me die in peace."

His refusal meant that he was officially denied a Christian burial, but his friends and family managed to arrange a secret interment in the Champagne region of France before the order became official.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Things You Should Know About Voltaire | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the anniversary of Voltaire's birth, learn 10 things you may not know about one of the 18th century's most quotable and controversial thinkers.

# data[].attributes.body
Early Life: Born in 1962 in Paris France

Education:
Lycée Louis-le-Grand

Influences:
Isaac Newton
John Locke
Francis Bacon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Quick Facts
"A witty saying proves nothing.""All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

Name

Voltaire

Occupation

Historian

Birth Date

November 21, 1694

Death Date

May 30, 1778

Education

Collége Louis-le-Grand

Place of Birth

Paris, France

Place of Death

Paris, France

Who Was Voltaire?

Born in 1694, in Paris, France, Voltaire established himself as one of the leading writers of the Enlightenment. His famed works include the tragic play Zaïre, the historical study The Age of Louis XIV and the satirical novella Candide. 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 1778.

Voltaire's Beliefs / Philosophy

Embracing Enlightenment philosophers such as Isaac Newton, John Locke and Francis Bacon, Voltaire 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."

Major Works

Voltaire wrote poetry and plays, as well as historical and philosophical works. His most well-known poetry includes The Henriade (1723) and The Maid of Orleans, which he started writing in 1730 but never fully completed.

Among the earliest of Voltaire's best-known plays is his adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus, which was first performed in 1718. Voltaire followed with a string of dramatic tragedies, including Mariamne (1724). His Zaïre (1732), written in verse, was something of a departure from previous works: Until that point, Voltaire's tragedies had centered on a fatal flaw in the protagonist's character; however, the tragedy in Zaïre was the result of circumstance. Following Zaïre, Voltaire continued to write tragic plays, including Mahomet (1736) and Nanine (1749).

Voltaire's body of writing also includes the notable historical works The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). In the latter, Voltaire took a unique approach to tracing the progression of world civilization by focusing on social history and the arts.

'Candide'

Voltaire's popular philosophic works took the form of the short stories Micromégas (1752) and Plato's Dream (1756), as well as the famed satirical novella Candide (1759), which is considered Voltaire's greatest work. Candide is filled with philosophical and religious parody, and in the end the characters reject optimism. There is great debate on whether Voltaire was making an actual statement about embracing a pessimistic philosophy or if he was trying to encourage people to be actively involved to improve society.

In 1764, he published another of his acclaimed philosophical works, Dictionnaire philosophique, an encyclopedic dictionary that embraced the concepts of Enlightenment and rejected the ideas of the Roman Catholic Church.

Arrests and Exiles

In 1716, Voltaire was exiled to Tulle for mocking the duc d'Orleans. In 1717, he returned to Paris, only to be arrested and exiled to the Bastille for a year on charges of writing libelous poetry. Voltaire was sent to the Bastille again in 1726, for arguing with the Chevalier de Rohan. This time he was only detained briefly before being exiled to England, where he remained for nearly three years.

"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer" ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him") - Epître à l'auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs, Voltaire, 1768

The publication of Voltaire's Letters on the English (1733) angered the French church and government, forcing the writer to flee to safer pastures. He spent the next 15 years with his mistress, Émilie du Châtelet, at her husband's home in Cirey-sur-Blaise.

Voltaire moved to Prussia in 1750 as a member of Frederick the Great's court, and spent later years in Geneva and Ferney. By 1778, he was recognized as an icon of the Enlightenment's progressive ideals, and he was given a hero's welcome upon his return to Paris. He died there shortly afterward, on May 30, 1778.

Early Life

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet to a prosperous family on November 21, 1694, in Paris, France. He was the youngest of five children born to François Arouet and Marie Marguerite d'Aumart. When Voltaire was just seven years old, his mother passed away. Following her death, he grew closer to his free-thinking godfather.

In 1704, Voltaire was enrolled at the Collége Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit secondary school in Paris, where he received a classical education and began showing promise as a writer.

Legacy and Later Relevance

In 1952, researcher and writer Theodore Besterman established a museum devoted to Voltaire in Geneva. He later set about writing a biography of his favorite subject, and following his death in 1976, the Voltaire Foundation was vested permanently at the University of Oxford.

The foundation continued to work toward making the Enlightenment writer's prolific output available to the public. It was later announced that The Oxford Complete Works of Voltaire, the first exhaustive annotated edition of Voltaire's novels, plays and letters, would expand to 220 volumes by 2020.

In November 2017, during an event to celebrate what would have been Voltaire's 323rd birthday, foundation director Nicholas Cronk explained how the famed writer used "fake news" to generate attention. Among his fabrications, Voltaire offered up differing dates for his birthday, and lied about the identity of his biological father.

Videos

Related Videos

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"A witty saying proves nothing." "All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." Name Voltaire Occupation Historian Birth Date November 21, 1694 Death Date May 30, 1778 Education Collége Louis-le-Grand Place of Birth Paris, France Place of Death Paris, France Born in 1694, in Paris, France, Voltaire established himself as one of the leading writers of the Enlightenment.