François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born in 1694 into a Parisian middle-class family, the son of a low-level treasury official. Educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704-11) on the outskirts of Paris, Voltaire went to law school from 1711 to 1713 before working as a secretary to the French ambassador in Holland. Soon thereafter, he devoted himself full-time to the vocation of writing. At the time, all official publications needed the stamp of approval of royal authorities. Given his tendency to engage in polemical attacks on the government and the Catholic church, Voltaire more than once found himself in a thorny legal position and forced into various exiles and...
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