Voltaire

Voltaire was born in Paris into a middle class family. Voltaire was educated by the

Jesuits. Voltaire’s writings did not gain approval of authorities, but he attacked the

government and the Catholic Church. This caused him many imprisonments and exiles.

Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions. The doctrines

about the Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as foolish thinking. Voltaire wrote a

play of Muhammad as a blind and destructive barbarian. In 1716 he was arrested and

exiled from Paris. At this time he wrote the tragedy (EDIPE and started to use his

known name, Voltaire. Between 1726 and 1729 he lived in exile in England. There he

wrote in English his first essays, ESSAY UPON EPIC POETRY and ESSAY UPON

THE CIVIL WARS IN FRANCE. After his exile he wrote plays, poetry, historical and

scientific treatises and was a royal historiographer. In 1731 HISTOROIRE DE

CHARLES XII Voltaire used rejected the idea that divine intervention guides history. In

1734 his Philosophical Letters compared the French system of government with the

system he had seen in England.

Candide’s world is full of liars, traitors, ingrates, thieves, misers, killers, fanatics,

hypocrites, and fools. Voltaire’s outrage is not based on social criticism but on his ironic

view of human nature. “Well, said Martin, if hawks have always had the same character,

why do you supposed that men have changed?” Candide rejects the philosophy of his

tutor, the unsuccessfully hanged Doctor Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this

best of all possible worlds". Candide was partly inspired by the devastating Lisbon

earthquake of 1755, Dr. Pangloss was allegedly a caricature of Leibniz, but it is possible that

the real model was Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), a French philosopher

and scientist, and prolific writer of studies from the physics of Venus to the proof of the

existence of God.

In addition to Candide, Voltaire treated the problem of evil among others in his classic tale

ZADIG (1747), set in the ancient Babylon, and in 'Poem of the Lisbon' Earthquake'. "But

how conceive a God supremely good," Voltaire asked in the poem, "Who heaps his favours on

the sons he loves, / Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?" MICROMÐ"‰GAS (1752) was an

early science-fiction story, in which two ambassadors from the outer space visit Earth, and

witness follies of human thought and behavior. Voltaire possibly wrote the conte already in

1738-39. It has similarities with 'Voyage du Baron Gangan', which he sent to Fredrick the

Great.

Voltaire defended freedom of thoughts and religious tolerance. In his DICTIONNAIRE

PHILOSPHIQUE (1764) he defined the ideal religion - it would teach very little dogma but

much morality. The work was condemned in Paris, Geneva, and Amsterdam. For safety

reasons