Voltaire
1694–1778
Biography
Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, a French writer, historian and philosopher of the Enlightenment who lived from 1694 to 1778. He was born in Paris and educated by Jesuits. He first won fame as a poet and dramatist, but his sharp wit repeatedly brought him trouble with the authorities. He was imprisoned in the Bastille, and in the later 1720s he spent several years in England, an experience that shaped his writing on religious and political liberty. In his later years he lived near Geneva, at Ferney.
He wrote in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, histories and a vast body of letters and pamphlets. He campaigned against religious persecution, most famously in the case of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant from Toulouse who was wrongly convicted and executed in 1762. Voltaire's efforts helped bring about the reversal of that verdict. He defended freedom of thought and of speech, and he mocked the abuses of church and state, which made him one of the most influential writers of his century.
The site holds Candide, ou l'optimisme, his best-known work, first published in 1759. A young man named Candide is driven across Europe and beyond through war, shipwreck and earthquake, while his tutor Pangloss insists that all is for the best. The short novel satirizes the optimistic philosophy associated with Leibniz and the complacency of its age, and it is still one of the most widely read works of the French Enlightenment.
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Books
Candide, ou l'optimisme
by Voltaire
Candide, raised in a Westphalian castle by a tutor who teaches that all is for the best, is kicked out for kissing the baron's daughter. His travels through war, earthquake, shipwreck and the Inquisition put that philosophy to a long and comic test. This book uses the racial and…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.