Brief biography about voltaire

Born in Paris into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was a brilliant pupil of the Jesuits. His rejection of his father’s attempts to guide him into a career in the law was sealed in 1718, when he invented a new name for himself: ‘de Voltaire’.

Voltaire is an anagram of ‘Arouet l(e) j(eune)’ (in the 18th century, i and j, and u and v, were typographically interchangeable). The addition of the aristocratic preposition ‘de’ may be an early sign of his social ambition, but the play on the verb volter, to turn abruptly, evokes a playful or ‘volatile’ quality which foretells the quick style, pervasive humour and irony that make Voltaire such an important figure in the history of the Enlightenment.

In the same year that he coined his new name, Voltaire enjoyed his first major literary success when his tragedy Œdipe was staged by the Comédie Française.

Meanwhile he was working on an epic poem which had as its protagonist Henri IV, the much-loved French monarch who brough