Who Was Voltaire?Franҫois-Marie Arouet, more commonly known as Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, philosopher, and playwright. He wrote more than two thousand books and pamphlets and more than twenty thousand letters. Voltaire was renown for his wit, satire, skepticism of the Catholic Church, and his unrelenting support of civil liberties such as freedom of expression, religion and speech. Despite his father’s desire for him to practice law, Voltaire pursued his interest in writing. Voltaire was an accomplished writer and produced works in almost every literary form. he wrote plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works.
Voltaire, widely considered to be one of France’s greatest Enlightenment writers, was born to an upper-middle class family on November 21, 1694, in Paris, France. He was the youngest of five children. When Voltaire was only just seven years old, his mother passed away and he began to grow closer to his free-thinking godfather. It is speculated that his godfather’s personality rubbed off on Voltaire, and is why Voltaire grew up to be so liberal. He has written many major works, however, some of his most successful works were plays. These included: Oedipus, Mariamne, and Zaïre, which were all tragedies. After the great success of those plays he continued to write more tragedies such as Mahomet, and Nanine. Voltaire’s great works of writing also included historical writings where he took a unique approach to tracing the progression of world civilization by putting a single emphasis on social history and the arts. Examples of those philosophical writings were Micromégas, Plato's Dream, and Candide. Voltaire even wrote an encyclopedic dictionary, the Dictionnaire philosophique, which embraced the concepts of the enlightenment and rejected the ideas of the Roman Catholic Church. Two months for before his death, Voltaire health began to decline. He bid farewell to crowd that had gathered at showing production of his play Irene, there he said, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.” Voltaire passed away in his sleep on May 30, in Paris, France. |