Birthdate: 21 November 1694
Nationality: French
Bio:
François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state.
Voltaire was born in Paris to an upper-middle class family. He was educated by the Jesuits but eventually renounced Catholicism, seeing the church as tools of oppression. After getting in trouble for insulting a nobleman in his early twenties, Voltaire was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille. He then went into self-imposed exile in England from 1726 to 1729, where he admired the emerging philosophies of empiricism and deism. On returning to France, Voltaire began publishing articles criticizing the French establishment and advocating for reform. This led to more clashes with the authorities and further temporary exiles from Paris.
During these periods away from the city, Voltaire continued his prolific writing. He produced works in almost every literary genre of the period, including plays, poems, novels, treatises and historical and philosophical works. His two great works that defined the Age of Enlightenment were the philosophical novel “Candide, ou l’Optimisme” (1759), which critiques the philosopher Leibniz’s theory of determinism, and the historical work “Siècle de Louis XIV” (1751), which helped shape the modern understanding of the Ancien Régime in France. Voltaire also regularly wrote letters and pamphlets to spread his views and challenge the established Catholic church’s dogma and intolerance of other religions.
As he aged, Voltaire’s calls for reform grew bolder. From his estate in Ferney near the Swiss border, which he purchased in 1760, he continued to advocate for religious freedom and challenge religious and political orthodoxy through his vast writings. His works influenced leading thinkers of the time and helped spread the ideals of the Enlightenment. By the end of his life, Voltaire had become a legendary and controversial figure who embodied the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression, separation of church and state, and scientific rationalism. He was offered a burial site in the Panthéon in Paris after his death in recognition of his important contributions to progress, but at the request of his family he was buried instead at the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne.
