How influential was Voltaire in the French Revolution?

Before you delve into Voltaire, you need to keep in mind that The Enlightenment, a collective heightened hunger for reasoning and intellectuality gave rise to the ideas that prompted the Revolution and overthrew the Ancien Regime. read more

However, the French Revolution was not done with the Enlightenment just yet. When Napoleon launched a coup d’etat in 1851, he also turned to Enlightenment thinkers. For him it was Voltaire and his theory of the enlightened dictator which most appealed. read more

Voltaire (1694-1778) was the pen-name of François-Marie Arouet, the Enlightenment philosopher, writer and critic of the Ancien Régime. Like most of the other philosophes, Voltaire was dead well before the French Revolution was in full swing – however, his writings shaped revolutionary ideology and, to some extent, the course of the revolution. read more