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François Arouet (Voltaire), 1694-1778.
From Parisian middle class origins, François Arouet was educated at the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand. After finishing school, Arouet found employment at the French embassy in the Hague, Netherlands, but this was shortlived. Deciding to dedicate himself to literature, the young Arouet made a name for himself as a wit about town in Paris, and one of his epigrams skewering the French regent Philippe of Orleans even got him briefly imprisoned in the Bastille in 1717. He rocketed to fame with his drama Oedipe in 1718, and adopted the pseudonym "Voltaire" in the aftermath. He went on to compose and publish the Henriade, an epic poem on Henry IV of France of popular memory, which earned him the favor (and a pension) from Orleans, and entry into the regency court. Voltaire cut a figure in the court and salons, as the quintessential philosophe.
Voltaire's wit crossed the powerful Chevalier du Rohan, which led him to be beaten, imprisoned and banished from France in May 1726. Voltaire spent two years in exile in England, deepening his familiarity with strands of English politics, ideology and thinking - becoming quickly enamored by the natural science of Newton, the empirical philosophy of Locke and Mercantilist thought, and even charmed by Shakespearean theatre. In his Letters on the English (1733), Voltaire credited English liberalism and freedom of thought, as well as its mercantile orientation, as the critical ingredient behind the success of English arms in recent wars.
Although a friend of Quesnay, Voltaire had a deep personal dislike of the Marquis of Mirabeau and became a virulent opponent of Physiocratic doctrine. In his 1768 anti-Physiocratic tract, l'homme aux quarante ecus, Voltaire ridiculed the concepts of "natural order", "net product" and the "single tax".
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