François-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, was
born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits,
he was an excellent pupil but one quickly enraged by dogma. An
early rift with his father — who wished him to study law — led to
his choice of letters as a career. Insinuating himself into court
circles, he became notorious for lampoons on leading notables and
was twice imprisoned in the Bastille.
By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a
four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and
Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later
in France, of Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733) — an
attack on French Church and State — forced him to flee again. For
twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his
most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as Zadig (1747)
and Candide (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made
bright by his adopted daughter, “Belle et Bonne,” and marked by his
intercessions on behalf of victims of political injustice.
Sharp-witted and lean in his white wig, impatient with all
appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778 — the foremost French
author of his day.
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