Voltaire didn’t invent the Enlightenment – he was the Enlightenment. Voltaire died in 1778, eleven years before the beginning of the French Revolution, after which the provocative public intellectual was raised from a popular literary superstar to a French national hero. The material may be biting and sarcastic, but the underlying passions are dead severe. Voltaire was an infamous libertine who had no patience for the repressive morality of the church that held priestly celibacy because the sexual superb. The philosophe, freely speaking his thoughts in the light of day, had swayed public opinion and righted a mistaken by intellectual combat. An awesome example was the Calas Affair, when a rich Protestant merchant was sentenced to dying by Catholic judges in the town of Toulouse for the alleged homicide of his son, supposedly because the son wished to transform to Catholicism. Voltaire’s superstar standing was solidified after the Calas Affair. Voltaire would have loved Twitter. He was what 18th-century France referred to as a philosophe and what we’d call in the present day a “public intellectual.” Through Voltaire’s voluminous writings – performs, prose tales, letters, journalism – he contributed to a new type of public discourse that was free-spirited, crucial, anti-establishment, and sometimes funny and entertaining. Born François-Marie Arouet in 1694 in France, Voltaire wrote countless performs, poems, satires and polemics – his collected works take up 200 volumes – and centuries earlier than there was a Madonna, Bono or Beyoncé, the one-named Voltaire was Europe’s first really trendy superstar. For Voltaire, free speech was just part of the whole liberty bundle. In them, he brilliantly ridiculed the state’s case and appealed to a better courtroom for a retrial, by which Calas was ultimately exonerated posthumously and his household’s fortune restored. Think of Voltaire as an 18th-century John Stewart, John Oliver or Trevor Noah. Not solely was the father, named Calas, brutally torn limb from limb by groups of horses, however his widow and surviving children were lower off from his inheritance. The ideas circulated in these publications would be discussed and debated at new mental arenas like city coffeehouses, public libraries and upper-class salons. It was the position of the philosophe to rail towards the old regime and expose its harmful absurdities. Voltaire was an enormous fan of Sir Isaac Newton and popularized the tale of Newton discovering the common regulation of gravity when he saw an apple fall out of a tree. Free thought, purpose and tolerance had prevailed over the merciless machinations of church and state. Voltaire grew to become the “avatar” or embodiment of Enlightenment philosophie and in so doing popularized a new sort of trendy mental stance. Like Adam Smith, Voltaire supported a free market system during which personal self-interest wasn’t considered as a “sin,” but drove competitors, innovation and progress. Due to some savvy investments, together with a scheme to win a Paris lottery, Voltaire lived a lavish way of life and defended his need for good things. The Calas episode neatly encapsulated one of many pillars of the Enlightenment, which was unfettered liberty of speech, no matter the topic and no matter the opinion. Voltaire’s “fans” weren’t only entertained by his witty writing and shocked by his public attacks in opposition to the church and other previous-guard establishments; they had been hungry for particulars of Voltaire’s tabloid-ready non-public life. It’s fallacious to call Voltaire a philosopher in the classical sense. Voltaire’s motto was “Ecrasez l’infâme!” which roughly translates to “Crush the infamy!” The “infamy” in Voltaire’s eyes was all the things that was flawed with European society, from priests telling people what to imagine and tips on how to dwell, to royal dynasties sending numerous men to their demise in meaningless wars. Voltaire launched a public marketing campaign to get justice for Calas, whom Voltaire believed was convicted out of blind prejudice without a shred of evidence. Voltaire embodied the Enlightenment ideas of mental freedom, sharp-tongued critique and the righteous battle of reason versus superstition. When the revolutionary government determined to entomb France’s “Nice Males” within the Panthéon, Voltaire was the very first to obtain the honor. And he did it on a public stage via his canny use of new publishing outlets like magazines and journals. Voltaire used his superstar persona because the brash, aggressive, provocateur to name out actual violations of public belief by established institutions, significantly the Catholic Church and its undo affect on the state. With a lawyer’s mind (Voltaire educated in the legislation in his youth) and his trademark wit, Voltaire wrote a sequence of unflinching pamphlets and letters that were printed throughout France and even made their approach to England in translation. In “The Invention of Superstar” by Antoine Lilti, the French historian notes that Voltaire understood “like no person else” how to maintain his title in the news by way of hilarious satires, bawdy poetry and shameless attacks on the “outdated regime” orthodoxy. Voltaire was so much greater than an Enlightenment “philosopher” or “thinker” – he lived his beliefs. In his erotic poetry and unapologetic personal life, Voltaire preached the deserves of hedonism. The Enlightenment was fueled by an explosion in new types of print media like pamphlets, journals and even magazines, says J.B. Shank, a history professor and director of the center for Early Trendy Historical past on the University of Minnesota. They needed their phrases and ideas – usually delivered with wit and shock worth – to form and influence public opinion, and from there to chip away on the very foundations of previous-guard European society. Voltaire was no starving artist, both. HowStuffWorks earns a small affiliate commission while you purchase via links on our site. Voltaire and his compatriots weren’t writing as mere intellectual workout routines.