Voltaire
1 book analyzed
Biography
François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), who took the pen name Voltaire, was the preeminent Enlightenment writer and one of the most dangerous voices in European intellectual life. He was imprisoned in the Bastille twice, exiled to England, and spent much of his adult life outside France to avoid persecution. He witnessed the political and religious absolutism of Louis XIV's France, studied empiricist philosophy in England (particularly Locke and Newton), and returned to France committed to the belief that reason, religious tolerance, and civil liberty were not merely philosophical ideals but practical necessities. He wrote Candide in ten days in 1759, allegedly, as a furious response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, to Leibnizian optimism, and to the Seven Years' War.