Such was the impromptu that Voltaire gave to howls of laughter at Sans Souci and that was soon circulated in manuscript throughout the literary circles of Europe, to be printed sometime later, but with the name of Timon of Athens, the famous misanthrope, substituted for that of Rousseau.

The French philosopher Voltaire was also influenced by Confucius, seeing the concept of Confucian rationalism as an alternative to Christian dogma.

In his youth Diderot was originally a follower of Voltaire and his deist Anglomanie, but gradually moved away from this line of thought towards materialism and atheism, a move which was finally realised 1747 in the philosophical debate in the second part of his La Promenade du sceptique ( 1747 ).

This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

A single issue of the magazine Cabaret Voltaire was the first publication to come out of the movement.

The Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until it was occupied from January to March, 2002, by a group proclaiming themselves Neo-Dadaists, led by Mark Divo.

The most famous of the French deists was Voltaire, who acquired a taste for Newtonian science, and reinforcement of deistic inclinations, during a two-year visit to England starting in 1726.

David's painting of Brutus was shown during the play Brutus, by the famous Frenchman, Voltaire.

When Voltaire died in 1778, the church denied him a church burial, and his body was interred near a monastery.

He was " one of the first Esprits cavaliers of the age ," a man of broad knowledge, an expert in Newtonianism, architecture and music and a friend of most of the leading authors of his times: Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d ' Argens, Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis and the atheïst Julien Offray de La Mettrie.

Algarotti accompanied Frederick to Bayreuth, Kehl, Strasbourg and Moyland Castle where they met with Voltaire, who was taking baths in Kleve for his health.

Rousseau, who was jealously sparing of his praises, addressed to him, in his Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, a fine panegyric ; and when a stranger flatteringly told Voltaire he had come to see a great man, the philosopher asked him if he had seen Abauzit.

Whether it was the king's intention to have his son executed as well ( as Voltaire claims ) is not clear.

The French Enlightenment writer Voltaire remarked sardonically: " This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Despite his light letter-writing in youth, in later life his correspondence was so voluminous that it has been estimated that he may have written around 30, 000 letters to various correspondents, a figure which places him second only to Voltaire as an epistolarian.

Voltaire was a highly influential historian during The Enlightenment ; he stressed the need to move away from great men and to study the people and their culture.

Many other French philosophes ( intellectuals ) exerted philosophical influence on a continental scale, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose essay The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right was a catalyst for governmental and societal reform throughout Europe.

In the early part of the 18th century the movement was dominated by Voltaire and Montesquieu, but the movement grew in momentum as the century moved on.

The leader of the French Enlightenment and a writer of enormous influence across Europe, was Voltaire ( 1694 – 1778 ).

When Rousseau subsequently became celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment of his children was used by his critics, including Voltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for ad hominem attacks.

According to Jacques Barzun: Voltaire, who had felt annoyed by the first essay the Arts and Sciences, was outraged by the second, on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, declaring that Rousseau wanted us to “ walk on all fours ” like animals and behave like savages, believing them creatures of perfection.

Welsh Jacobins include William Jones, a radical patriot who was a keen disciple of Voltaire.

Voltaire was very directly satirizing the widely-read philosophical work by Gottfried Leibniz, particularly the Theodicee, in which Leibniz asserts that the world, no matter how we may perceive it, is necessarily the " best of all possible worlds ".

Paul H. Meyer adds: " There is no question but that Voltaire, particularly in his latter years, nursed a violent hatred of the Jews and it is equally certain that his animosity ... did have a considerable impact on public opinion in France.

Her fame spread throughout Europe following a sensational success in London in 1841, and became particularly associated with the works of Racine, Voltaire, and Corneille, touring in Brussels, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.

The same could be said of the works of Voltaire, particularly his comedic and philosophically satirical novel, Candide, which, according to recent research, sold more than 20, 000 copies in its first month alone in 1759.

" If Christianity ", he wrote, " has been a degradation, a corruption, Voltaire in attacking it has been a benefactor of the human race ; but if the contrary be true, then the passing of Voltaire over the Christian earth has been a great calamity.

Fréron is now remembered solely for his attacks on Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, and for the retaliation from Voltaire, who, besides attacking Fréron in epigrams, and even incidentally in some of his tragedies, directed against him a virulent satire, Le Pauvre diable, and made him the principal personage in a comedy L ' Ecossaise, in which the journal of Fréron is designated L ' Âne littéraire, " the Literary Ass ".

Unlike many former historians ( e. g. Voltaire and Condorcet ), who denigrated the Middle Ages, he endeavored to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster Western science in one of its most fruitful periods.

Voltaire wrote of the Empire as something neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire, and in comparison to the British " empire ", saw its German counterpart as an abysmal failure that reached its pinnacle of success in the early Middle Ages and declined thereafter.

His numerous works include Contes philosophiques et moraux ( 1765 ), Les Deux Ages du goût et du génie sous Louis XIV et sous Louis XV ( 1769 ), a parallel and contrast, in which the decision is given in favor of the latter ; L ' Espagne littéraire ( 1774 ); Eloge de Voltaire ( 1779 ) and Eloge de Montaigne ( 1781 ).

The early 18th century sees the conclusion of the Baroque period and the incipient Age of Enlightenment with authors such as Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

The late 18th century was a period of political, economic, intellectual, and cultural reforms, the Enlightenment ( represented by figures such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith ), but also involving early Romanticism, and climaxing with the French Revolution, where freedom of the individual and nation was asserted against privilege and custom.

By this period the Massacre was being widely used by Voltaire ( in his Henriade ) and other Enlightenment writers in polemics against organized religion in general.

Fontenelle was a popular figure in the educated French society of his period, holding a position of esteem comparable only to that of Voltaire.

In paintings from Janco's Cabaret Voltaire period, the figurative element is not canceled, but usually subdued: the works show a mix of influences, primarily from Cubism or Futurism, and have been described by Janco's colleague Arp as " zigzag naturalism ".

This volume covers the period of the Age of Enlightenment, as exemplified by Voltaire, focusing on the period between 1715 and 1756 in France, Britain, and Germany.

The French preachers of the classical seventeenth-century period were, according to Voltaire, probably the greatest in pulpit oratory of all time.

Relković's prison years became his Lehrjahre, his educational period: a voracious but unsystematic reader, he studied many works by leading Enlightenment writers ( Voltaire, Bayle, Diderot ), as well as Polish poet Jan Kochanowski's didactic epic Satir-which became the model for his most famous work.

The early modern period also saw the growth of French-Swiss literature with several famous authors, including the native-born Rousseau, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, as well as many other writers living in Switzerland.

The early 18th century sees the conclusion of the Baroque period and the incipient Age of Enlightenment with authors such as Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

During this period, she was involved in the Zürich Dada movement, which centered on the Cabaret Voltaire.

Edward Gibbon, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder, William Lecky, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire were among the many Western writers of that period who were critical of the Byzantine system.