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Posted: 13 Jun 2020

Taken: 13 Jun 2020

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Voltaire

Voltaire
Voltaire was a prodigious worker. This painting shows him dictating to his secretary from the very moment he hops out of bed (Bulloz)
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The most famous and in many ways most representative philosophe was Francois Marie Arouet, who was known by the pen name of Voltaire (1694-1788). In his long career, this son of a comfortable middle-class family wrote over seventy witty volumes, hobnobbed with kings and queens, and died a millionaire because of shrewd business speculation. His early career, however, was turbulent in 1717 Voltaire was imprisoned for eleven months in Bastille in Paris for insulting the regent of France. In 1726 a barb from his sharp tongue led a great French nobleman to have him beaten and arrested. This experience made a deep impression on Voltaire. All his life he struggled against legal injustice and class inequalities before the law.

Unlike Montesquieu, Voltaire pessimistically concluded that the best one could hope for in the way of government was a good monarch, since human beings “are very rarely worthy to govern themselves.” Nor did he believe in social equality in human affairs. The idea of making servants equal to their masters was “absurd and impossible.” The only realizable equality, Voltaire thought was that “by which the citizen only depends on the laws which protect the freedom of the feeble against the ambitions of the strong. ` Page 587

A HISTORY OF WESTERN SOCEITY
4 years ago. Edited 23 months ago.