Amber Lee
IB History 11
September 2, 2002
Enlightenment Philosophers – Voltaire
Those of you who have read from my poem, Discourse on Man (1738), will understand what I mean when I say that the secret of being a bore is to tell everything. So it is with that in mind I introduce myself to you on this charming day in Ferny, Switzerland.
You know me as Voltaire. It has been ten years since I settled here in 1758. I was born in Paris on Noveber 21, 1694 in a middle-class family, and assumed the name Francois-Marie Arouet. It wasn’t until my 11-month imprisonment in the Bastille in 1717 that I began using the name Voltaire, with the completion of my first tragedy, Oedipe. Based upon the Oedipus tyrannous of the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles and commenced into an epic poem on Henry IV of France, the play brought me much fame, but also more enemies at court. A quarrel with a member of an illustrious French family, the chevalier de Rohan, resulted in my second incarceration in the Bastille and eventually my exile to England. I soon mastered the English language and achieved an almost unprecedented success with the work I had done there, not only in my native France, but throughout all the continent of Europe. Since then, I have gained much popularity in court under the influence of the marquise de Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV.
