Francois Marie Arouet a.k.a. Voltaire

Anything too stupid to be said is sung. Voltaire

French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)

• was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade.

• Voltaire was a prolific writer, and produced works in almost every literary form, authoring plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, over 20,000 letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets.

He was influenced by several of the neoclassical writers of the age, and developed an interest in earlier English literature, especially in the works of Shakespeare, still little known in continental Europe at the time

“Those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you commit atrocities.”                                               —Voltaire

Voltaire, though often thought an atheist, did in fact partake in religious activities and even erected a chapel on his estate at Ferney.

Like many other key figures during the European Enlightenment, Voltaire considered himself a Deist. He did not believe that absolute faith, based upon any particular or singular religious text or tradition of revelation, was needed to believe in God.

Voltaire's focus instead on the idea of a universe based on reason and a respect for nature reflected the contemporary Pantheism, increasingly popular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which continues in a form of deism today known as "Voltairean Pantheism."

Bibliography

Holmes, Richard (2000). Sidetracks: explorations of a romantic biographer. HarperCollins, pp.345-366. and "Voltaire's Grin" in New York Review of Books, 30 November 1995, pp. 49 - 55

Palmer, R.R.; Colton, Joel (1950). A History of the Modern World. McGraw-Hill, Inc.. ISBN 0-07-040826-2.