Voltaire, FranÇois-Marie Arouet De(1694–1778)
François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire encapsulates the spirit of the French Enlightenment in both his refusal to develop a philosophical system and his clear concern for social and political issues. But he is also representative of the eighteenth century in his deep attachment to John Locke's epistemological thought, his emphasis on the limited nature of human understanding, and his commitment to popularizing philosophy, especially by handling it through the medium of novels and tales in which irony often functions as an ad hominem argument. It is thus that he fulfilled the role of philosopher and that his philosophy met the needs of his times, times characterized by a break with seventeenth-century dogmatism and an intensification of the critique of the political and religious spheres aiming to bring forth a morality on the human scale, centered on the values of tolerance and respect for others. Those values were soon to bear fruit in the doctrine of the Rights of Man.
Born in Paris to an established bourgeois Parisian family, François-Marie Arouet, who took the name Voltaire in 1718, received a sound education from his Jesuit teachers at the Collège Louis-le-Grand and soon managed to make his way into the most brilliant Parisian intellectual milieu of his time.
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