Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet]

François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was a writer, philosopher, poet, dramatist, historian and polemicist of the French Enlightenment. He is perhaps best known as the author of Candide and the Traité sur la tolérance, but also wrote the influential histories Siècle de Louis XIV and Essai sur les mœurs. The diversity of his literary output is rivalled only by its abundance: he is known to have authored something like 2000 separate works, and while some may be as short as a four-line poem, others run to several volumes.

Over the course of his long life, Voltaire was at the forefront of intellectual and political debate and gained an unprecedented degree of celebrity. He was involved in innovations on the French stage, literary and personal quarrels, and endless publishing endeavours. Towards the end of his life, he became a passionate campaigner against religious and secular injustice, expressed with characteristic economy in his rallying cry of ‘Écrasez l’infâme’. He lived in and around Paris, in England, Cirey-en-Campagne, Brussels, Berlin and Potsdam, Alsace and in the neighbourhood of Geneva and Lausanne, before settling in Ferney in 1760, where he was master of his own château and village. He left only to travel to Paris in February 1778, where he died at the end of May of that year. He gave his name to the eighteenth century (‘le siècle de Voltaire’) and is buried in the Pantheon in Paris.

Future updates to OV will include the digitisation of the Voltaire Foundation’s great biography of Voltaire, written by René Pomeau, Christiane Mervaud, René Vaillot and others.

• François Arouet