Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What years did Voltaire live?
François-Marie Arouet (French:[fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694–30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire (/vɒlˈtɛər/;[2] French:[vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state.
"Henriade" is one of two epic poems by Voltaire, the other being "La Pucelle d'Orléans", which took Joan of Arc as a subject of satire. Voltaire wrote other poems during his life, but none were nearly as lengthy or detailed as these two. While "Henriade" was viewed as a great poem, and as one of Voltaire's best, many did not believe it to be his masterpiece, or the best he was capable of; many claimed it lacked originality or novel inspiration, and that it was nothing truly extraordinary. Some remarked that this low standard of quality came of Voltaire's non-comprehension of what he was writing, and his lack of enthusiasm in the poem's writing.
It is the only live album by Voltaire, and his first album to be self-released.
In Russia, Catherine the Great had been reading Voltaire for sixteen years prior to becoming Empress in 1762.[206][208] In October 1763, she began a correspondence with the philosopher that continued till his death. The content of these letters has been described as being akin to a student writing to a teacher.[209] Upon Voltaire's death, the Empress purchased his library, which was then transported and placed in The Hermitage.[210] Alexander Herzen remarked that "The writings of the egoist Voltaire did more for liberation than those of the loving Rousseau did for brotherhood."[211] In his famous letter to N. V. Gogol, Vissarion Belinsky wrote that Voltaire "stamped out the fires of fanaticism and ignorance in Europe by ridicule."[212]
Voltaire's opinion of the Bible was mixed. Although influenced by Socinian works such as the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, Voltaire's skeptical attitude to the Bible separated him from Unitarian theologians like Fausto Sozzini or even Biblical-political writers like John Locke.[130] His statements on religion also brought down on him the fury of the Jesuits and in particular Claude-Adrien Nonnotte.[131][132][133][134] This did not hinder his religious practice, though it did win for him a bad reputation in certain religious circles. The deeply Christian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father the year of Voltaire's death, saying, "The arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket ..."[135] Voltaire was later deemed to influence Edward Gibbon in claiming that Christianity was a contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
Voltaire described Muhammad as an "impostor", a "false prophet", a "fanatic" and a "hypocrite".[172][173] Defending the play, Voltaire said that he "tried to show in it into what horrible excesses fanaticism, led by an impostor, can plunge weak minds".[174] When Voltaire wrote in 1742 to César de Missy, he described Mohammed as deceitful.[175][176]
Voltaire's father died when he was four months old. At ten months old, Voltaire emigrated to New Jersey with his mother and sister and his mother remarried. However, he states that he did not enjoy residing there, stating he was a victim of bullying because of his heritage and strange hobbies and interests. At the age of ten, Voltaire was inspired by the films of Ray Harryhausen ("Jason and the Argonauts", "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad"), and began animating on a super 8 camera. By piecing together snippets of information from fanzines, he eventually was able to teach himself how to make foam rubber animation models and animate them. His stepfather was abusive, considering Voltaire's strange hobbies and interests to indicate he was homosexual. A family friend sexually molested him from infancy into his teenage years. His girlfriend at the time committed suicide, which made him consider doing the same. Before he followed through, he promised himself to live one more day, doing and saying what he wanted to do and say. This allowed him to stand up to the people who were bullying him, and instantly elevated his self-esteem. Though he considered committing suicide again the next day, he was able to hold it off indefinitely. At the age of 17, he ran away from home and moved to New York City. His first job there was an animator with Parker Brothers. Voltaire says that he loves New York, and that the only other place he would be happy living is Tokyo.
The phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", which was originally intended as a summary (by Hall) of Voltaire's attitude, was widely misread as a literal quotation from Voltaire.
The Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire) is the first critical edition of the totality of Voltaire's writings (in the original French) arranged chronologically. The project was started by the bibliographer and translator Theodore Besterman who only lived to see the first two volumes published. It is currently published by the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford.
How dare you mock the honors rendered to Voltaire in the temple of which he is the god, and by the priests who for fifty years have been living off his masterpieces?[228]
The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book De l'esprit, but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire. Her interpretation does capture the spirit of Voltaire's attitude towards Helvetius; it had been said Hall's summary was inspired by a quotation found in a 1770 Voltaire letter to an Abbot le Riche, in which he was reported to have said, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."[117] Nevertheless, scholars believe there must have again been misinterpretation, as the letter does not seem to contain any such quote.[lower-alpha 5]
Though deeply committed to the Marquise, Voltaire by 1744 found life at the château confining. On a visit to Paris that year, he found a new love—his niece. At first, his attraction to Marie Louise Mignot was clearly sexual, as evidenced by his letters to her (only discovered in 1957).[73][74] Much later, they lived together, perhaps platonically, and remained together until Voltaire's death. Meanwhile, the Marquise also took a lover, the Marquis de Saint-Lambert.[75]
Venice had changed for him. Casanova now had little money for gambling, few willing females worth pursuing, and few acquaintances to enliven his dull days. He heard of the death of his mother and, more paining, visited the deathbed of Bettina Gozzi, who had first introduced him to sex and who died in his arms. His "Iliad" was published in three volumes, but to limited subscribers and yielding little money. He got into a published dispute with Voltaire over religion. When he asked, "Suppose that you succeed in destroying superstition. With what will you replace it?" Voltaire shot back, "I like that. When I deliver humanity from a ferocious beast which devours it, can I be asked what I shall put in its place." From Casanova's point of view, if Voltaire had "been a proper philosopher, he would have kept silent on that subject ... the people need to live in ignorance for the general peace of the nation".
In August 1736, Frederick the Great, then Crown Prince of Prussia and a great admirer of Voltaire, initiated a correspondence with him.[66] That December, Voltaire moved to Holland for two months and became acquainted with the scientists Herman Boerhaave and 's Gravesande.[67] From mid-1739 to mid-1740 Voltaire lived largely in Brussels, at first with the Marquise, who was unsuccessfully attempting to pursue a 60-year-old family legal case regarding the ownership of two estates in Limburg.[68] In July 1740, he traveled to the Hague on behalf of Frederick in an attempt to dissuade a dubious publisher, van Duren, from printing without permission Frederick's Anti-Machiavel.[69] In September Voltaire and Frederick (now King) met for the first time in Moyland Castle near Cleves and in November Voltaire was Frederick's guest in Berlin for two weeks;[70] in September 1742 they met in Aix-la-Chapelle.[71] Voltaire was sent to Frederick's court in 1743 by the French government as an envoy and spy to gauge Frederick's military intentions in the War of the Austrian Succession.[72]
During Voltaire's residence, the population of Ferney increased to more than 1,000. Voltaire lived there for the last 20 years of his life before returning to Paris, where he died in 1778.
The town of Ferney, where Voltaire lived out the last 20 years of his life, was officially named Ferney-Voltaire in honor of its most famous resident in 1878.[238] His château is a museum. Voltaire's library is preserved intact in the National Library of Russia at Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the Zurich of 1916, the theatre and performance group who would become the early avant-garde movement Dada named their theater The Cabaret Voltaire. A late-20th-century industrial music group then named themselves after the theater. Astronomers have bestowed his name to the Voltaire crater on Deimos and the asteroid 5676 Voltaire.[239]
The main topics of discussion in the Voltaire-Catherine letters were Russia's foreign and domestic affairs. Despite their mutual affection for literature, art and philosophy, very rarely did Catherine and Voltaire discuss such topics. One scholar has suggested that Catherine did not have the intellectual capacity to have such discussions with Voltaire, and that Catherine brought up primarily political affairs in her letters in order to impart her political ideas onto Voltaire. They did discuss cultural matters in the year 1772, which suggests that Catherine wanted to distract Voltaire from her recent partition of Poland.
At nineteen he entered the Society of Jesus and preached at Amiens, Versailles, and Turin. When Voltaire began to issue his "Essai sur les moeurs" (1754), which the Catholic Church considered an attack on Christianity, Nonnotte published, anonymously, the "Examen critique ou Réfutation du livre des moeurs"; and when Voltaire finished his publication (1758), Nonnotte revised his book, which he published at Avignon (2 vols., 1762). He dealt with what he saw as historical and doctrinal errors contained in Voltaire's work. Nonnotte's work reached the sixth edition in 1774. Voltaire retorted in his "Eclaircissements historiques", and the back and forth attacks continued for twenty years.
In the 1950s Besterman began to concentrate on collecting, translating and publishing the writings of Voltaire, including much previously unpublished correspondence. This was to occupy him for the rest of his life. He lived at Voltaire's house in Geneva, where he founded the Institut et Musée Voltaire and published 107 volumes of Voltaire's letters and a series of books entitled "Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century". The Forum for Modern Language Studies called Besterman's edition of the correspondence "the greatest single piece of Voltairian scholarship for over a century.".
According to Victor Hugo: "To name Voltaire is to characterize the entire eighteenth century."[202] Goethe regarded Voltaire to be the greatest literary figure in modern times, and possibly of all times.[203] According to Diderot, Voltaire's influence on posterity would extend far into the future.[204][lower-alpha 7] Napoleon commented that till he was sixteen he "would have fought for Rousseau against the friends of Voltaire, today it is the opposite...The more I read Voltaire the more I love him. He is a man always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic."[205] Frederick the Great commented on his good fortune for having lived in the age of Voltaire, and corresponded with him throughout his reign until Voltaire's death.[206] In England, Voltaire's views influenced Godwin, Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Byron and Shelley.[203] Macaulay made note of the fear that Voltaire's very name incited in tyrants and fanatics.[207][lower-alpha 8]
The dramatist, author and philosopher Voltaire created, with the support of the Académie française, a twelve-volume annotated set of Corneille's dramatic works, the "Commentaires sur Corneille". It was Voltaire's largest ever work of literary criticism. Voltaire's proposal to the Académie described Corneille as doing for the French language what Homer had done for Greek: showing the world that it could be a medium for great art. Voltaire was driven to defend classic French literature in the face of increasingly popular foreign influences such as William Shakespeare. This is reflected in the first edition of the "Commentaires", published in 1764, which focused on Corneille's better works and had relatively muted criticisms. By the second edition, published ten years later, Voltaire had come to a more negative assessment of Corneille and a stronger view on the need for objective criticism. He added five hundred critical notes, covering more works and taking a more negative tone.
Critics' opinions of Corneille were already highly polarised. Voltaire's intervention polarised the debate further and some critics saw his criticisms as pedantic and driven by envy. In the 19th century, the tide of opinion turned against Voltaire. Napoleon expressed a preference for Corneille over Voltaire, reviving the former's reputation as a dramatist while diminishing the latter's.
William Hogarth's painting "" features a flautist (who stands next to a painting of Zeus, as an eagle, abducting Ganymede), which may be a satirical depiction of Frederick – thereby publicly outing him as a homosexual as early as 1744. Frederick certainly spent much of his time at Sanssouci, his favourite residence in Potsdam, in a circle that was exclusively male, though a number of his entourage were happily married. The palace gardens include a Temple of Friendship (built as a memorial to Wilhelmine), which celebrate the homoerotic attachments of Greek Antiquity, and which is decorated with portraits of Orestes and Pylades, amongst others. At Sanssouci, Frederick entertained his most privileged guests, especially the French philosopher Voltaire, whom he asked in 1750 to come to live with him. Their literary correspondence and friendship, which spanned almost 50 years, was marked by mutual intellectual fascination, and began as a flirtation. However, in person Frederick found Voltaire difficult to live with, and was often annoyed by Voltaire's many quarrels with his other friends. Voltaire's angry attack on Maupertuis, the President of Frederick's academy, in the form of "Le Diatribe du Docteur Akakia" provoked Frederick to burn the pamphlet publicly and put Voltaire under house arrest, after which Voltaire left Prussia.
In the 1750s Voltaire began writing his "Mémoires." The manuscript was stolen and a pirate copy was published in Amsterdam in 1784 as "The Private Life of the King of Prussia". In it, Voltaire explicitly detailed Frederick's homosexuality and the circle surrounding him. The revelations and language were strikingly similar to those detailed in a scurrilous pamphlet published in French, in London in 1752. After a temporary cooling of Frederick and Voltaire's friendship, they resumed their correspondence, and aired mutual recriminations, to end as friends once more. A further intimate friendship was with his first valet Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf who, Frederick confided to his diary, had "a very pretty face": Fredersdorf was provided with an estate, and acted as unofficial prime minister.
Catherine's letters to Voltaire often served as a means to woo the influential philosopher to her cause. Rather than pursue intellectual subjects, Catherine utilized her letters to flatter and cajole the philosopher. While Voltaire often attempted to initiate the Empress in an intellectual dialogue, Catherine often sidestepped his inquiries. For example, "Voltaire did try to start a discussion…in the case of the [Claude Adrien] Helvetius translation by Golitsuin. In response to Voltaire's comments…Catherine blithely agrees…but confesses she has not read the book yet,". One has the impression that Voltaire would have liked to dwell on literary, philosophic or artistic subjects as he did with his other correspondents. However, Catherine was far more interested in winning the philosopher's approval than in entering a philosophical dialogue. 
The content of her letters does not permit one to see her primary motives as anything other than propagandistic. She is not at all interested in broadening her cultural and intellectual horizons. Catherine seeks no advice from Voltaire on how to rule Russia….Instead Catherine tries to impose her views, justify her policies and explain away her failures. Voltaire is, for Catherine, the best method of diffusing favorable information in Europe. As a testament to Catherine's political ingenuity, she skillfully kept Voltaire at arm's length, feigning a belief in absolute liberalism in her letters while, in practice, implementing repressive reforms in her country. For example, the opinion she shares with Voltaire regarding serfdom did not always correspond with the laws she passed. "The Empress turned over 800,000 peasants to private proprietors. The 1763 law limiting freedom of movement by requiring the peasant to get a permit from the landlord before he/she could leave the property has been cited as evidence that Catherine enserfed peasants in the name of fiscal expediency,". Catherine's correspondence largely acted as propaganda intended to assure Voltaire (and Europe) of Russia's prosperity. Handicapped by distance and a lack of information, Voltaire was simply too willing to believe in Catherine's liberalism.
From 1737, supported by his wife, he became Voltaire’s literary critical friend, as well as his theatre agent and even his stage director. While Voltaire was exiled in Ferney it was the d’Argentals who did what was necessary to bring his plays to the stage, securing the venues, contracting the actors, and working with them intensively to ensure that Voltaire’s meaning was properly communicated.
The song is featured on four albums — it was first released on "Boo Hoo", Voltaire's third album. It later appeared on "Deady Sings!", Voltaire's greatest hits album. It also featured on "", a compilation album released by Projekt Records, which displayed their most popular artists. A live version of the song is also available on Voltaire's live album, "Live!".