|
In this edition of the program we are remembering Voltaire, the great French philosopher, novelist, historian, dramatist and poet, the embodiment of the 18th century Enlightenment... His real name was Francois-Marie Arouet. Voltaire was born on November
21, 1694 into the family of a notary public in In the late 1725 Voltaire got insulted by Chevalier de Roan-Chabot, the scion of one of France’s oldest aristocratic families. Voltaire’s sarcastic response was as prickly as it was tactless. Two days later another brush followed and soon after, just as Voltaire was dining with Duc de Sully, he was called out into the street, attacked and beaten up while Chevalier de Roan-Chabot was instructing his goons from his carriage. Voltaire’s high-born friends immediately sided with their fellow aristocrat. To hush up the whole affair, the authorities put Voltaire behind bars letting Chevalier de Roan-Chabot get away with it all… Two weeks later they let Voltaire go on condition he left Paris and so he spent the next two years in Britain studying various aspects of English life. Getting back to France, Voltaire started his famous sixteen-year liaison with Madame du Chatelet. The long years the lovers lived in Madame du Chatelet’s Chateau de Cirey in eastern France sealed Voltaire’s lifelong career of a thinker and novelist. In 1745 he was elected to the French Academy. Madame du Chatelet died in 1749. For several years, she, jealous of her lover, kept persuading Voltaire to turn down an invitation by Prussia’s King Frederick the Great to join his court. With Madame du Chatelet now dead, there was no reason left for him not to go and, shortly after, Voltaire finally moved to Potsdam. The initial enthusiasm of working for the enlightened Prussian monarch quickly gave way to boredom inspired by his duty to correct the King’s French-language poems and prose. To avoid an open conflict with his master, Voltaire happily moved on to Switzerland. With Paris now off limits to him after three years of what appeared as a voluntary exile to Germany, Voltaire settled down in Geneva. He spent the rest of his life in the Alpine state alternatively living in one of the two castles he bought himself close to the French border. For nearly 20 years Voltaire, in his own words, “ruled” his “little kingdom” setting up watch-making and pottery shops, breeding cattle and horses, testing novel farming implements and corresponding with friends and admirers from across the continent. Anybody of note came to visit him at his Ferney castle and all that time Voltaire was writing articles denouncing wars and all forms of persecution always standing up for religious and political freedoms. In 1778 Voltaire allowed himself to be talked into getting back to Paris where, admired by everybody and ignoring the undisguised enmity of King Louis XVI, he kept working hard attending the premiere of his last tragedy, Irene, meeting with Benjamin Franklin and contributing to the new edition of the Academic Dictionary. Many of his plans never came true though. Two months after returning to Paris, Voltaire died He was 86… The famous Maulan Publishers put out 50 volumes of Voltaire’s works
600 pages long each with an extra two volumes of indices. 18 tomes contain
more than 10,000 letters Voltaire wrote during his lifetime, including
his correspondence with Russian Empress Catherine the Great who admired
the outstanding French thinker whom she called “my teacher”…
|
Paris.
He lost his mother when he was seven and spent the next six years educated
by Jesuits at the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Before devoting himself
entirely to writing Voltaire, at his father’s insistence, spent three years
studying law but his interest in poetry and theater eventually prevailed
as the young Arouet was mingling with liberal-minded aristocrats close
to Duc de Vandomme, the then head of the Maltese Knights Order. From the
beginning Voltaire had troubles with the authorities as he energetically
attacked the King and the Catholic Church. In his early twenties Voltaire
spent eleven months in the Bastille prison for lampooning the Regency.
To kill time, he started writing his famous epic poem the Henriad and his
tragedy Oedipus staged by the Comedie Francais theater brought the 24-year-old
author nationwide fame earning his comparisons with Sophocles, Cornel and
Racine. It was then and there that Francois-Marie Arouet added the aristocratic
de Voltaire to his name...
