Francois - Marie Arouet was born in Paris on November 21, 1694. He later argued that his real birth-date took place on February 20, 1694, regardless of the information presented in his birth certificate (“Voltaire” 524). The pen name Voltaire was not acquired later until 1718 when he was released from a yearlong imprisonment at the Bastille (Durant, and Durant 3). His father was Francois Arouet, a respectable attorney. His mother, Marie Marguerite Daumard, was considered be Voltaire to be the intellect of the family. As a child Voltaire was frail and sickly. He was born tiny and pale, and nobody thought he would live past one year (3). He outlived everybody’s predictions by eighty-three years, and lived to be eight

It is now evident that Voltaire continued to share his religious and political views throughout his entire life regardless of how many people that he offended. All during his eighty-four years of life Voltaire continued to amaze and upset people. Voltaire was one of the most thorough, intelligent philosophers of the eighteenth century.

Voltaire expressed his sometimes cutting and spiteful views in plays, epic poems, philosophical tales, and over twenty thousand letters. He also wrote fifty or more tragic dramas (Gay 6). One of him most famous plays is Oedipe, which is said to challenge the works of Sophocles. Oedipe is a tale of incest, thought to reflect upon the relations of the Regent with his daughter (Durant, Durant 36), being very similar to the tale of Oedipus and his affair with his mother. Although many of his works are not read, a few have went on to become quite famous. The story Candide is one of his most interesting stories. It is a tale of a young man who was brought up in a noble castle and expelled when the Baron thought Candide kiss his daughter, Cunegonde, on the hand. Most of Voltaire’s views can be read in his Lettres philosophiques, or The Philosophical Letters. Other less popular works by Voltaire are Les Voyages du baron de Gangan (1739), Elements de la philosophie de Newton (1738), about Newton’s philosophies, and Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), translated as The Philosophical Dictionary (“Voltaire“ 527), which he shares his views on religion, politics, love, ignorance and many other subjects.

y-four years old. As a young boy his parents hired Voltaire his first tutor, the Abbé de Châteaneuf. He introduced Voltaire to a mock epic, La Moïsade, which was a manuscript that circulated secretly (3). The theme of the epic was that religion was a device used by rulers to keep the ruled in order and awe (3). This epic may have influenced a vast majority of Voltaire’s philosophies. At age ten, Voltaire was admitted to the Jesuit College of

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