Introduction

"The age of Voltaire" has become synonymous with "the Enlightenment", but although Voltaire’s eminence as a philosophe is self-evident, the precise originality of his thought and writings is less easily defined. Born in Paris into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was a brilliant pupil of the Jesuits. His rejection of his father's attempts to guide him into a career in the law was sealed in 1718, when he invented a new name for himself: "de Voltaire". Voltaire is an anagram of "Arouet l(e) j(eune)" (in the 18th century, "i" and "j" and "u" and "v" were typographically interchangeable). The addition of the aristocratic preposition "de" may be an early sign of his social ambition, but the play on the verb volter , to turn abruptly, evokes a playful or "volatile" quality which fortells the quick style, pervasive humour and irony that make Voltaire such an important figure in the history of the Enlightenment.