Where is voltaire from

Voltaire had a strained relationship with his father, who discouraged his literary aspirations and tried to force him into a legal career. Voltaire never explained the meaning of his pen name, so scholars can only speculate on its origins. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly a year.

The young writer was unable to bite his tongue, however, and only a year later he was arrested and confined to the Bastille for writing scandalous verse implying the regent had an incestuous relationship with his daughter. Voltaire boasted that his cell gave him some quiet time to think, and he eventually did 11 months behind bars before winning a release.

He later endured another short stint in the Bastille in April , when he was arrested for planning to duel an aristocrat that had insulted and beaten him.

To escape further jail time, he voluntarily exiled himself to England, where he remained for nearly three years.

He became hugely wealthy by exploiting a flaw in the French lottery. In , Voltaire teamed with mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine and others to exploit a lucrative loophole in the French national lottery. The government shelled out massive prizes for the contest each month, but an error in calculation meant that the payouts were larger than the value of all the tickets in circulation.

With this in mind, Voltaire, La Condamine and a syndicate of other gamblers were able to repeatedly corner the market and rake in massive winnings. The scheme left Voltaire with a windfall of nearly half a million francs, setting him up for life and allowing him to devote himself solely to his literary career.

He was an extraordinary prolific writer. Voltaire wrote more than 50 plays, dozens of treatises on science, politics and philosophy, and several books of history on everything from the Russian Empire to the French Parliament.

Along the way, he also managed to squeeze in heaps of verse and a voluminous correspondence amounting to some 20, letters to friends and contemporaries. They would, however, reconcile in the s. Starting in , Voltaire took up the causes of unjustly persecuted people, particularly those who were victims of religious persecution. Among his most notable causes was the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot who was convicted of murdering his son for wanting to convert to Catholicism and tortured to death; his property was confiscated and his daughters forced into Catholic convents.

Voltaire, along with others, strongly doubted his guilt and suspected a case of religious persecution. The conviction was overturned in In early , he was initiated into Freemasonry , and historians dispute as to whether he did so at the urging of Benjamin Franklin or not. He also returned to Paris for the first time in a quarter century to see his latest play, Irene , open.

Two months later, however, he became ill again and died on May 30, Accounts of his deathbed vary wildly, depending on the sources and their own opinions of Voltaire. He left behind a complicated legacy. For instance, while he argued for religious tolerance, he also was one of the origins of Enlightenment-era anti-Semitism.

He endorsed anti-enslavement and anti-monarchical views, but disdained the idea of democracy as well. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors.

Share Flipboard Email. Amanda Prahl. Assistant Editor. Amanda Prahl is a playwright, lyricist, freelance writer, and university instructor. Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval culture to Middle Eastern civilization, and consistently exposed the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages.

In his criticism of the French society and existing social structures, Voltaire hardly spared anyone. He 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 and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself.

Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. Voltaire Key Points Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state.

Most of his prose was written as polemics, with the goal of conveying radical political and philosophical messages. He 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 and oppressive force. The term is occasionally used to refer to the similar feudal social and political order of the time elsewhere in Europe.

The Philosophical Dictionary An encyclopedic dictionary published by Voltaire in