Voltaire is read about 5,814 times a day, in 180 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?The pen name stuck because the man behind it made a career of poking holes in power. Voltaire turned wit into a weapon against the Catholic Church, slavery, and the French monarchy's censorship machine - and somehow became the Enlightenment's first international literary brand.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 12
![Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell with ten-foot-thick walls.[19]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Bastille_1715.jpg/500px-Bastille_1715.jpg)
Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell with ten-foot-thick walls.[19]
Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton, 1738![In the frontispiece to Voltaire's book on Newton's philosophy, Émilie du Châtelet appears as Voltaire's muse, reflecting Newton's heavenly insights down to Voltaire.[61]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Voltaire_Philosophy_of_Newton_frontispiece.jpg/1280px-Voltaire_Philosophy_of_Newton_frontispiece.jpg)
In the frontispiece to Voltaire's book on Newton's philosophy, Émilie du Châtelet appears as Voltaire's muse, reflecting Newton's heavenly insights down to Voltaire.[61]
Pastel by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1735
Die Tafelrunde by Adolph von Menzel: guests of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci, including members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Voltaire, third from left
Voltaire's château at Ferney, FranceIn their own words 10
, If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.
Awards
Family
Parents
VoltaireIs this everyone?
Only relatives with a profile here are drawn, so a family can be larger than this. A line here can also be wrong.
Correct this familyAbout this person
François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris on 21 November 1694 and adopted "Voltaire" as the name under which he'd wage war on intolerance. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets, working in every form - plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, even scientific expositions - while dodging the monarchy's censors at every turn. His polemics savaged religious dogma and the institutions that enforced it, championing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state. Candide, his best-known novella, dismantled Gottfried Leibniz's optimism by dragging the idea that ours is the "best of all possible worlds" through a gauntlet of absurdity. Prolific, commercially successful, and perpetually at risk of arrest, he died in Paris on 30 May 1778, having spent a lifetime proving that a sharp sentence lands harder than a decree.
Fame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.