Voltaire: A Brief Bio

François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778), known by his pen-name Voltaire, is a French philosopher, writer, and public activist during the Enlightenment. Despite the controversy he attracted, his intelligence, wit and style made him one of France's greatest philosophers and writers. He was such a prolific writer that some may even say Voltaire wasn’t a philosopher at all in the modern sense. In addition to his philosophical work, he has produced almost every form of literature (plays, novels/stories, essays, historical and scientific works, and poems). He was an outspoken supporter of social reform (including the defense of civil liberties, freedom of religion and free trade), despite the strict censorship laws and harsh penalties of the period, and made use of some works to criticize the Catholic Church and French institutions of his day. Voltaire’s works, ideas, and activities influenced both important thinkers of the American and French Revolutions, and the direction of European civilization.

Voltaire was born on November 21^st, 1694 in Paris, France. He was the youngest of five in a middle-class family. His father, Francois Arouet, was a notary and minor treasury official, and his mother, Marie Marguerite d’Aumart, was from a noble family of the Poitou province. Voltaire was educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris from 1704 to 1711, where he showed an early gift for languages, learning Latin and Greek as a child, and later becoming fluent in Italian, Spanish and English as well. By the time he left college, he already decided he wanted to become a writer, and despite his father’s disapproval, he continued to spend time writing.

Voltaire’s wit had made him popular among some aristocratic families, and a favorite in society circles. However, since an early age, Voltaire had trouble with the French authorities for his energetic attacks on the government and the Catholic Church, which resulted in numerous imprisonments and exiles (i.e. exiled to England from 1726-1729 and Chateau de Cirey [NE France] from 1734-1749) throughout his life.

Many of Voltaire’s works and romances were written as polemics, and were often preceded by his sarcastic, yet conversational introductions. Candide (1759), one of the best known and most successful, for example, attacked Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophy of religious and philosophical optimism with well-crafted satire and irony. Voltaire also rejected Blaise Pascal's pessimistic philosophy of man's depravity, and tried to steer a middle course in which man was able to find moral virtue through reason. Voltaire's largest philosophical work was the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)("Philosophical Dictionary"), comprising articles contributed by him to the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers ("Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts") (1751 - 1772) and several minor pieces. It directed criticisms at French political institutions, and Voltaire's personal enemies, the Bible and Roman Catholic Church.

Like many other key figures during the European Enlightenment, Voltaire considered himself a Deist, and he was instrumental in Deism's spread from England to France during his lifetime. He did not believe that absolute faith, based upon a singular or any religious text or tradition of revelation, was needed to believe in God. He wrote, "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". His focus on the idea of a universe based on reason and a respect for nature reflected the Pantheism that was increasingly popular throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

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