‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’

’ I disagree with every word you say, but will defend till my end your right to say it.’

’ In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other’.

These are words of Voltaire, French writer, satirist, the embodiment of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Voltaire is remembered as a crusader against tyranny and bigotry. From the beginning, Voltaire had troubles with the authorities, but he energetically attacked the government and the Catholic Church. These activities led to numerous imprisonments and exiles. In his early twenties he spent eleven months in the Bastille for writing satiric verses about the aristocracy. Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religion. As a humanist, Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, but not necessarily in a direct way. In 1716 Voltaire was arrested and exiled from Paris for five months. From 1717 to 1718 he was imprisoned in the Bastille for lampoons of the Regency. At his 1726 stay at the Bastille, Voltaire was visited by a flow of admirers. In 1734 appeared Voltaire's Philosophical Letters in which he compared the French system of government with the system he had seen in England. Voltaire stated that he had perceived fewer barriers between occupations in England than in his own country. The book was banned, and Voltaire was forced to flee Paris. In 1740 Voltaire was an ambassador-spy in Prussia, then in Brussels (1742-43), and in 1748 he was at the court of King Stanislaus. From 1745 to 1750 he was a historiographer to Louis XV and in 1746 he was elected to the French Academy. Voltaire settled in 1755 in 1755 in Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, apart from trips to France. Voltaire returned to a hero's welcome in Paris at age 83. The excitement of the trip was too much for him and he died in Paris. Because of his criticism of the church Voltaire was denied burial in church ground. He was finally buried at an abbey in Champagne. In 1791 his remains were moved to a resting place at the Pantheon in Paris. In his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) he defined the ideal religion - it would teach very little dogma but a lot of morality.