Voltaire
1694–1778 4 entries
Biography
Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet in Paris, was a French writer, historian and philosopher, the best-known figure of the Enlightenment. His sharp tongue twice took him to the Bastille, and after a quarrel with a nobleman he went into exile in England, whose freedoms and science he admired. He wrote plays, poems, histories and essays, and his Philosophical Letters, which praised English tolerance, were burned in Paris. He spent some years at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia before settling at Ferney, near the Swiss border.
His short novel Candide, published in 1759, mocks blind optimism and ends with the advice that we must cultivate our garden. He fought tirelessly against fanaticism and injustice, and his campaign to clear the name of Jean Calas, a Protestant executed in Toulouse, stirred all of Europe. He returned to Paris in triumph at the age of eighty-three and died there a few months later, in 1778.
- Aphorisms 4