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Voltaire

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                          Voltaire
         Voltaire at 24 by Nicolas de Largillière.
         Born 21 November 1694
              Paris, France
      Died    30 May 1778
              Paris, France
   Occupation Writer and philosopher
    Parents   François Arouet and Marie Marguerite d'Aumart

   François-Marie Arouet ( 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), better known
   by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist,
   deist and philosopher.

   Voltaire was known for his sharp wit, philosophical writings, and
   defence of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and the right
   to a fair trial. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform despite
   strict censorship laws in France and harsh penalties for those who
   broke them. A satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works
   to criticize Church dogma and the French institutions of his day.
   Voltaire is considered one of the most influential figures of his time.

Biography

Early years

   Bust of Voltaire by the artist Antoine Houdon, 1781.
   Enlarge
   Bust of Voltaire by the artist Antoine Houdon, 1781.

   François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694, the son of
   François Arouet, a notary who was a minor treasury official, and his
   wife, Marie Marguerite d'Aumart, from a noble family of the Poitou.
   Voltaire was educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand
   (1704-11), where he learned Latin and Greek; later in life he became
   fluent in Italian, Spanish and English. From 1711 to 1713 he studied
   law. Before devoting himself entirely to writing, Voltaire worked as a
   secretary to the French ambassador in Holland. Most of Voltaire's early
   life revolved around Paris until his exile. From the beginning Voltaire
   had trouble with the authorities for his energetic attacks on the
   government and the Catholic Church. These activities were to result in
   numerous imprisonments and exiles. In his early twenties he spent
   eleven months in the Bastille for writing satirical verses about the
   aristocracy.

   After graduating, Voltaire set out on a career in literature. His
   father, however, intended his son to be educated in the law. Voltaire,
   pretending to work in Paris as assistant to a lawyer, spent much of his
   time writing satirical poetry. When his father found him out, he again
   sent Voltaire to study law, this time in the provinces. Nevertheless,
   he continued to write, producing essays and historical studies not
   always noted for their accuracy. Voltaire's wit made him popular among
   some of the aristocratic families. One of his writings, about Louis
   XV's regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, led to his being imprisoned
   in the Bastille. While there, he wrote his debut play, Oedipe, and
   adopted the name Voltaire. Oedipe's success began Voltaire's influence
   and brought him into the French Enlightenment.

Exile to England

   Voltaire's repartee continued to bring him trouble, however. After he
   offended a young nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan, the Rohan family had
   a lettre de cachet issued, a secret warrant that allowed for the
   punishment of people who had committed no crimes or who possibly posed
   a risk to the royal family, and used it to exile Voltaire without a
   trial. The incident marked the beginning of Voltaire's attempt to
   improve the French judiciary system.

   Voltaire's exile to England greatly influenced him through ideas and
   experiences. The young man was impressed by England's constitutional
   monarchy, as well as the country's support of the freedoms of speech
   and religion. He was influenced by several people, including such
   writers as Shakespeare. In his younger years, he saw Shakespeare as an
   example French writers should look to, though later Voltaire saw
   himself as the superior writer. Many of his later works were influenced
   by this stay. After three years in exile, Voltaire returned to Paris
   and published his ideas in a fictional document about the English
   government entitled the Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais
   (Philosophical letters on the English). Because he regarded England's
   constitutional monarchy as more developed and more respectful of human
   rights (particularly religious tolerance) than its French counterpart,
   these letters met great controversy in France, to the point where
   copies of the document were burnt and Voltaire was forced to leave
   Paris.

The Château de Cirey

   Voltaire at 70 years old, an engraving from an 1843 edition of his
   Philosophical Dictionary
   Enlarge
   Voltaire at 70 years old, an engraving from an 1843 edition of his
   Philosophical Dictionary

   Voltaire then set out to the Château de Cirey, located on the borders
   of Champagne, France and Lorraine. The building was renovated with his
   money, and here he began a relationship with the Marquise du Châtelet,
   Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil. The Chateau de Cirey was
   owned by the Marquise's husband, Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet,
   who sometimes visited his wife and her lover at the chateau. Their
   relationship, which lasted for fifteen years, led to much intellectual
   development. Voltaire and the Marquise collected over 21,000 books, an
   enormous number for their time. Together, Voltaire and the Marquise
   also studied these books and performed experiments. Both worked on
   experimenting with the " natural sciences," the term used in that epoch
   for physics, in his laboratory. Voltaire performed many experiments
   including one that attempted to determine the properties of fire.

   The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica comments that "If the English visit
   may be regarded as having finished Voltaire's education, the Cirey
   residence was the first stage of his literary manhood." Having learned
   from his previous brushes with the authorities, Voltaire began his
   future habit of keeping out of personal harm's way, and denying any
   awkward responsibility. He continued to write, publishing plays such as
   Mérope and some short stories. Again, a main source of inspiration for
   Voltaire were the years he spent exiled in England. During his time
   there, Voltaire had been strongly influenced by the works of Sir Isaac
   Newton, a leading philosopher and scientist of the epoch. Voltaire
   strongly believed in Newton's theories, especially concerning optics
   (Newton’s discovery that white light is composed of all the colors in
   the spectrum led to many experiments by him and the Marquise), and
   gravity (the story of Newton and the apple falling from the tree is
   mentioned in his Essai sur la poésie épique, or Essay on Epic Poetry).
   Although both Voltaire and the Marquise were also curious about the
   philosophies of Gottfried Leibniz, a contemporary and rival of Newton,
   the pair remained "Newtonians" and based their theories on Newton’s
   works and ideas. Though it has been stated that the Marquise may have
   been more "Leibnizian", which may have caused tension between the two,
   this is probably an exaggeration; the Marquise even wrote "je
   newtonise," which, translated, means "I am 'newtoning'". Voltaire wrote
   a book on Newton's philosophies: the Eléments de la philosophie de
   Newton (The Elements of Newton's Philosophies). The Elements was
   probably written with the Marquise, and describes the other branches of
   Newton's ideas that fascinated him: it spoke of optics and the theory
   of attraction (gravity).

   Voltaire and the Marquise also studied history - particularly the
   people who had contributed to civilization up to that point. Voltaire
   had worked with history since his time in England; his second essay in
   English had the title Essay upon the Civil Wars in France. When he
   returned to France, he wrote a biographical essay of King Charles XII.
   This essay was the beginning of Voltaire's rejection of religion; he
   wrote that human life is not destined or controlled by greater beings.
   The essay won him the position of historian in the king's court.
   Voltaire and the Marquise also worked with philosophy, particularly
   with metaphysics, the branch of philosophy dealing with the distant,
   and what cannot be directly proven: why and what life is, whether or
   not there is a God, and so on. Voltaire and the Marquise analyzed the
   Bible, trying to find its validity in the world. Voltaire renounced
   religion; he believed in the separation of church and state and in
   religious freedom, ideas he formed after his stay in England. Voltaire
   even claimed that "One hundred years from my day there will not be a
   Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian
   curiosity seeker."

   After the death of the Marquise, Voltaire moved to Berlin to join
   Frederick the Great, a close friend and admirer of his. The king had
   repeatedly invited him to his palace, and now gave him a salary of
   20,000 francs a year. Though life went well at first, he began to
   encounter difficulties. Faced with a lawsuit and an argument with the
   president of the Berlin Academy of science, Voltaire wrote the Diatribe
   du docteur Akakia (Diatribe of Doctor Akakia) which derided the
   president. This greatly angered Frederick, who had all copies of the
   document burned and arrested Voltaire at an inn where he was staying
   along his journey home. Voltaire headed toward Paris, but Louis XV
   banned him from the city, so instead he turned to Geneva, where he
   bought a large estate. Though he was received openly at first, the law
   in Geneva which banned theatrical performances and the publication of
   La pucelle d'Orléans against his will led to Voltaire's writing of
   Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism) in 1759 and his eventual
   departure. Candide, a satire on the philosophy of Leibniz, remains the
   work for which Voltaire is perhaps best known.

Works

   Voltaire was a prolific writer, and produced works in almost every
   literary form, authoring plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and
   scientific works, over 20,000 letters and over two thousand books and
   pamphlets. In addition to his novels listed below, some of his most
   significant works include these:
     * Oedipe (1718)
     * Zaire ( 1732)
     * Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733), revised as Letters
       on the English (circa 1778)
     * Le Mondain (1736)
     * Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)
     * Micromégas (1752)
     * Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
     * Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs ( Letter to the
       author of The Three Impostors) (1770)

Novels and Novellas

     * Zadig (1747)
     * Micromégas (1752)
     * Candide (1759)
     * L'Ingénu (1767)

Plays

   Voltaire wrote between fifty and sixty plays, including a few
   unfinished ones. Among them are these:
     * Oedipe (1718)
     * Eriphile (1732)
     * Mahomet
     * Mérope
     * Nanine
     * Zaïre (1732)

Historical

     * History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731)
     * The Age of Louis XIV (1752)
     * The Age of Louis XV (1746 - 1752)
     * Annals of the Empire - Charlemagne, A.D. 742 - Henry VII 1313, Vol.
       I (1754)
     * Annals of the Empire - Louis of Bavaria, 1315 to Ferdinand II 1631
       Vol. II (1754)
     * History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great (Vol. I 1759;
       Vol. II 1763)

Poetry

   From an early age, Voltaire displayed a talent for writing verse, and
   his first published work was poetry. He wrote two long poems, the
   Henriade, and the Pucelle, besides many other smaller pieces.

   The Henriade was written in imitation of Virgil, using the Alexandrine
   couplet reformed and rendered monotonous for dramatic purposes.
   Voltaire lacked both enthusiasm for and understanding of the subject,
   which both negatively impacted the poem's quality. The Pucelle, on the
   other hand, is a burlesque work attacking religion and history.
   Voltaire's minor poems are generally considered superior to either of
   these two works.

Prose and romances

   Many of Voltaire's prose works and romances, usually composed as
   pamphlets, were written as polemics. Candide attacks religious and
   philosophical optimism, L'Homme aux quarante ecus certain social and
   political ways of the time, Zadig and others the received forms of
   moral and metaphysical orthodoxy, and some were written to deride the
   Bible. In these works, Voltaire's ironic style without exaggeration is
   apparent, particularly the extreme restraint and simplicity of the
   verbal treatment. Voltaire never dwells too long on a point, stays to
   laugh at what he has said, elucidates or comments on his own jokes,
   guffaws over them or exaggerates their form. Candide in particular is
   the best example of his style.

   Voltaire also has, in common with Jonathan Swift, the distinction of
   paving the way for science fiction's philosophical irony, particularly
   in his Micromegas.

Voltaire's Deism

   Voltaire, like many key figures of the European Enlightenment, was a
   Deist. He did not believe that faith was needed to believe in God. He
   wrote, "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It
   is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal,
   supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of
   reason."

   Because he believed in God based on reason and not on any of the
   religious books of any of the various revealed religions, Voltaire
   rejected the teachings of Christianity.

Views on Christianity

   Voltaire opposed Christian beliefs fiercely but not consistently. On
   one hand, he claimed that the Gospels were fabricated and Jesus did not
   exist - that they were produced by those who wanted to create God in
   their own image and were full of discrepancies. On the other hand, he
   claimed that this very same community preserved the texts without
   making any change to adjust those discrepancies.

   Voltaire is reputed to have proclaimed about the Bible, "In 100 years
   this book will be forgotten and eliminated...", although there is no
   direct evidence that he made such a statement. In his later years
   (1759) Voltaire purchased an estate called "Ferney" on the French-Swiss
   border. As the property stradled the border, Voltaire joked that when
   the French Catholics were against him, he lived on the Swiss
   (Protestant) half, and vice versa. There is an apocryphal story that
   this house was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society and used for
   printing Bibles, but this appears to be due to a misunderstanding of
   the 1849 annual report of the American Bible Society . Voltaire's
   chateau is now owned and administered by the French Ministry of
   Culture.

Views on race

   Voltaire expressed his views on race, mostly in his work Essai sur les
   mœurs, holding that black people, whom he called "animals", were a
   peculiar species of human because of what he perceived as great
   differences from other humans, both physically and mentally. He also
   wrote of the culture of indigenous peoples. Voltaire expressed much the
   same views in his personal correspondence. Voltaire's viewpoint on Jews
   reveals anti-Semitism on his part.

Philosophy

   Voltaire's largest philosophical work is the Dictionnaire
   philosophique, comprising articles contributed by him to the
   Encyclopédie and of several minor pieces. It directed criticism against
   French political institutions, Voltaire's personal enemies, the Bible
   and the Roman Catholic Church, showing the character, literary and
   personal, of Voltaire.

Views on New France

   Voltaire was a critic of France's colonial policy in North America,
   dismissing the vast territory of New France as " a few acres of snow"
   ("quelques arpents de neige") that produced little more than furs and
   required constant - and expensive - military protection from the mother
   country against Great Britain's 13 Colonies to the south.

Correspondence

   Voltaire also engaged in an enormous amount of private correspondence
   during his life, totalling over 21,000 letters. His personality shows
   through in the letters that he wrote: his energy and versatility, his
   unhesitating flattery when he chose to flatter, his ruthless sarcasm,
   his unscrupulous business faculty and his resolve to double and twist
   in any fashion so as to escape his enemies.

Legacy

   Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and
   ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners
   as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force useful
   only as a counterbalance since its "religious tax" or the tithe helped
   to create a strong backing for revolutionaries.

   Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy
   of the masses. To Voltaire, only an enlightened monarch or an
   Enlightened absolutist, advised by philosophers like himself, could
   bring about change as it was in the king's rational interest to improve
   the power and wealth of his subjects and kingdom. Voltaire is quoted as
   saying that he "would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of [his own]
   species." Voltaire essentially believed monarchy to be the key to
   progress and change.

   He supported "bringing order" through military means in his letters to
   Catherine II of Russia and Frederick II of Prussia where he strongly
   praised the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was,
   however, deeply opposed to the use of war and violence as means for the
   resolution of controversies, as he repeatedly and forcefully stated in
   many of his works, including the "Philosophical Dictionary," where he
   described war as a "hellish enterprise" and those who resort to it
   "ridiculous murderers."

   He is best known today for his novel, Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide,
   or Optimism, 1759), which satirized the philosophy of Leibniz. Candide
   was also subject to censorship and Voltaire jokingly claimed that the
   actual author was a certain "Dr DeMad" in a letter, where he reaffirmed
   the main polemical stances of the text. .

   Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, such as: "Si Dieu
   n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer" ("If God did not exist, it
   would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a verse epistle from
   1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work, The
   Three Impostors.

   Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, not to be confused with the philosopher
   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sent a copy of his "Ode to Posterity" to
   Voltaire. Voltaire read it through and said, "I do not think this poem
   will reach its destination."

   Voltaire is remembered and honored in France as a courageous polemicist
   who indefatigably fought for civil rights — the right to a fair trial
   and freedom of religion — and who denounced the hypocrisies and
   injustices of the ancien régime. The ancien régime involved an unfair
   balance of power and taxes between the First Estate (the clergy), the
   Second Estate (the nobles), and everyone else (the commoners and middle
   class, who were burdened with most of the taxes).

   Thomas Carlyle argued that while he was unsurpassed in literary form,
   not even the most elaborate of Voltaire's works was of much value for
   matter and that he never uttered an original idea of his own.

   Voltaire did not let his ideals interfere with the acquisition of his
   fortune. He was a millionaire by the time he was forty after
   cultivating the friendship of the Paris brothers who had a contract to
   supply the French army with food and munitions and being invited to
   participate with them in this extremely profitable enterprise.
   According to a review in the March 7, 2005 issue of The New Yorker of
   Voltaire's Garden, a mathematician friend of his realized in 1728 that
   the French government had authorized a lottery in which the prize was
   much greater than the collective cost of the tickets. He and Voltaire
   formed a syndicate, collected all the money, and became moneylenders to
   the great houses of Europe. Voltaire complained that lotteries
   exploited the poor.

   The town of Ferney, France, where Voltaire lived out the last 20 years
   of his life (though he died in Paris), is now named Ferney-Voltaire.
   His château is now a museum (L'Auberge de l'Europe). Voltaire's library
   is preserved intact in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg.

The pen name "Voltaire"

   The name "Voltaire," which he adopted in 1718 not only as a pen name
   but also in daily use, is an anagram of the latinized spelling of his
   surname "Arovet" and the first letters of the sobriquet "le jeune"
   ("the younger"): AROVET Le Ieune. The name also echoes in reversed
   order the syllables of a familial château in the Poitou region:
   "Airvault". The adoption of this name after his incarceration at the
   Bastille is seen by many to mark a formal separation on the part of
   Voltaire from his family and his past.

   Richard Holmes in "Voltaire's Grin" also believes that the name
   "Voltaire" arose from the transposition of letters. But he adds that a
   writer such as Voltaire would have intended the name to carry its
   connotations of speed and daring. These come from associated words such
   as: "voltige" (acrobatics on a trapeze or horse), "volte-face"
   (spinning about to face your enemies), and "volatile" (originally any
   winged creature).

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