On this day in 1694 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) was born. Few could have predicted his Age-defining stature, but apparently the young Voltaire showed every sign of becoming, as biographer Theodore Besterman puts it, "one of those over-life-size personages who seem perpetually to attract equally extraordinary events." As a teenager in Paris, Voltaire was so fond of the freethinking "libertins" that his father had him removed to Caen and then the Netherlands, for instruction in the political arts. This did not work, nor did attempts to become a lawyer -- these encouraged by father's threats of sending him to the West Indes or even prison, by way of a lettre de cachet ... FULL STORY »
