Imagen de francois-marie arouet de voltaire biography
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Voltaire
1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist
Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. His work Lettres philosophiques, published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date, Voltaire’s life in no way pointed him toward the philosophical destiny that he was later to assume. His early orientation toward literature and libertine sociability, however, shaped his philosophical identity in crucial ways.
1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)
François-Marie d’Arouet was born in 1694, the fourth of five children, to a well-to-do public official and his well bred aristocratic wife. In its fusion of traditional French aristocratic pedigree with the new wealth and power of royal bureaucratic administration, the d’Arouet family was representative of elite society in France during the reign of
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Voltaire
French writer, historian, and philosopher (1694–1778)
For other uses, see Voltaire (disambiguation).
Voltaire | |
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Portrait c. 1720s, the Musée Carnavalet | |
| Born | François-Marie Arouet (1694-11-21)21 November 1694 Paris, France |
| Died | 30 May 1778(1778-05-30) (aged 83) Paris, France |
| Resting place | Panthéon, Paris |
| Occupation | Writer, philosopher, historian |
| Education | Collège Louis-le-Grand |
| Genres | |
| Subjects | Religious intolerance, freedom |
| Literary movement | Classicism |
| Years active | From 1715 |
| Notable works | Candide The Maid of Orleans The Age of Louis XIV |
| Partner | Émilie du Châtelet (1733–1749) Marie Louise Mignot (1744–1778) |
Philosophy career | |
| Era | Age of Enlightenment |
| Region | Western philosophy French philosophy |
| School | |
Main interests | Political philosophy, literature, historiography, biblical criticism |
Notable ideas | Philosophy of history,[1]freedom of religion, freedom of speech, • His lifeBorn in Paris into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was a brilliant pupil of the Jesuits. His rejection of his father’s attempts to guide him into a career in the law was sealed in 1718, when he invented a new name for himself: ‘de Voltaire’. Voltaire is an anagram of ‘Arouet l(e) j(eune)’ (in the 18th century, i and j, and u and v, were typographically interchangeable). The addition of the aristocratic preposition ‘de’ may be an early sign of his social ambition, but the play on the verb volter, to turn abruptly, evokes a playful or ‘volatile’ quality which foretells the quick style, pervasive humour and irony that make Voltaire such an important figure in the history of the Enlightenment. In the same year that he coined his new name, Voltaire enjoyed his first major literary success when his tragedy Œdipe was staged by the Comédie Française. Meanwhile he was working on an epic poem which had as its protagonist Henri IV, the much-loved French monarch who brough |