document_title: Voltaire

question_text: who was twice imprisoned in the bastille (french prison) for his controversial satires

question_tokens: who was twice imprisoned in the bastille ( french prison ) for his controversial satires

text: Voltaire

text: Biography[edit]

text: François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris, the youngest of the five children of François Arouet (19 August 1649 – 1 January 1722), a lawyer who was a minor treasury official, and his wife, Marie Marguerite Daumard (c. 1660 – 13 July 1701), whose family was on the lowest rank of the French nobility.[3] Some speculation surrounds Voltaire's date of birth, because he claimed he was born on 20 February 1694 as the illegitimate son of a nobleman, Guérin de Rochebrune or Roquebrune.[4] Two of his older brothers—Armand-François and Robert—died in infancy and his surviving brother, Armand, and sister Marguerite-Catherine were nine and seven years older, respectively.[5] Nicknamed 'Zozo' by his family, Voltaire was baptized on 22 November 1694, with François de Castagnère, abbé de Châteauneuf (fr), and Marie Daumard, the wife of his mother's cousin, standing as godparents.[6] He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704–1711), where he was taught Latin, theology, and rhetoric;[7] later in life he became fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English.[8]

text: By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided he wanted to be a writer, against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to become a lawyer.[9] Voltaire, pretending to work in Paris as an assistant to a notary, spent much of his time writing poetry. When his father found out, he sent Voltaire to study law, this time in Caen, Normandy. Nevertheless, he continued to write, producing essays and historical studies. Voltaire's wit made him popular among some of the aristocratic families with whom he mixed. In 1713, his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands, the marquis de Châteauneuf (fr), the brother of Voltaire's godfather.[10] At The Hague, Voltaire fell in love with a French Protestant refugee named Catherine Olympe Dunoyer (known as 'Pimpette').[10] Their scandalous affair was discovered by de Châteauneuf and Voltaire was forced to return to France by the end of the year.[11]

text: Most of Voltaire's early life revolved around Paris. From early on, Voltaire had trouble with the authorities for critiques of the government. These activities were to result in two imprisonments and a temporary exile to England. One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused the Régent of incest with his own daughter, led to an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille.[13] The Comédie-Française had agreed in January 1717 to stage his debut play, Œdipe, and it opened in mid-November 1718, seven months after his release.[14] Its immediate critical and financial success established his reputation.[15] Both the Régent and King George I of Great Britain presented Voltaire with medals as a mark of their appreciation.[16]

text: He mainly argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. He campaigned to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority, and supported a constitutional monarchy that protects people's rights.[17][18]

text: Adopts the name "Voltaire"[edit]

text: The author adopted the name "Voltaire" in 1718, following his incarceration at the Bastille. Its origin is unclear. It is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, and the initial letters of le jeune ("the young").[19] According to a family tradition among the descendants of his sister, he was known as le petit volontaire ("determined little thing") as a child, and he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life.[20] The name also reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family's home town in the Poitou region.[21]

text: Richard Holmes[22] supports the anagrammatic derivation of the name, but adds that a writer such as Voltaire would have intended it to also convey its connotations of speed and daring. These come from associations with words such as voltige (acrobatics on a trapeze or horse), volte-face (a spinning about to face one's enemies), and volatile (originally, any winged creature). "Arouet" was not a noble name fit for his growing reputation, especially given that name's resonance with à rouer ("to be beaten up") and roué (a débauché).

text: In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire concludes by asking that, if Rousseau wishes to send him a return letter, he do so by addressing it to Monsieur de Voltaire. A postscript explains: "J'ai été si malheureux sous le nom d'Arouet que j'en ai pris un autre surtout pour n'être plus confondu avec le poète Roi", (I was so unhappy under the name of Arouet that I have taken another, primarily so as to cease to be confused with the poet Roi.)[23] This probably refers to Adenes le Roi, and the 'oi' diphthong was then pronounced like modern 'ouai', so the similarity to 'Arouet' is clear, and thus, it could well have been part of his rationale. Indeed, Voltaire is known also to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime.[24]

text: La Henriade and Mariamne[edit]

text: Voltaire's next play, Artémire (de), set in ancient Macedonia, opened on 15 February 1720. It was a flop and only fragments of the text survive.[25] He instead turned to an epic poem about Henri IV of France that he had begun in early 1717.[26] Denied a licence to publish, in August 1722 Voltaire headed north to find a publisher outside France. On the journey, he was accompanied by his mistress, Marie-Marguerite de Rupelmonde, a young widow.[27]

text: At Brussels, Voltaire and Rousseau met up for a few days, before Voltaire and his mistress continued northwards. A publisher was eventually secured in The Hague.[28] In the Netherlands, Voltaire was struck and impressed by the openness and tolerance of Dutch society.[29] On his return to France, he secured a second publisher in Rouen, who agreed to publish La Henriade clandestinely.[30] After Voltaire's recovery from a month-long smallpox infection in November 1723, the first copies were smuggled into Paris and distributed.[31] While the poem was an instant success, Voltaire's new play, Mariamne, was a failure when it first opened in March 1724.[32] Heavily reworked, it opened at the Comédie-Française in April 1725 to a much-improved reception.[32] It was among the entertainments provided at the wedding of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska in September 1725.[32]

text: Great Britain[edit]

text: In early 1726, a young French nobleman, the chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, taunted Voltaire about his change of name, and Voltaire retorted that his name would be honoured while de Rohan would dishonour his.[33] Infuriated, de Rohan arranged for Voltaire to be beaten up by thugs a few days later.[34] Seeking compensation, redress, or revenge, Voltaire challenged de Rohan to a duel, but the aristocratic de Rohan family arranged for Voltaire to be arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille on 17 April 1726 without a trial or an opportunity to defend himself.[35][36] Fearing an indefinite prison sentence, Voltaire suggested that he be exiled to England as an alternative punishment, which the French authorities accepted.[37] On 2 May, he was escorted from the Bastille to Calais, where he was to embark for Britain.[38]

text: In England, Voltaire lived largely in Wandsworth, with acquaintances including Everard Fawkener.[39] From December 1727 to June 1728 he lodged at Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, now commemorated by a plaque, to be nearer to his British publisher.[40] Voltaire circulated throughout English high society, meeting Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and many other members of the nobility and royalty.[41] Voltaire's exile in Great Britain greatly influenced his thinking. He was intrigued by Britain's constitutional monarchy in contrast to French absolutism, and by the country's greater support of the freedoms of speech and religion.[42] He was influenced by the writers of the age, and developed an interest in earlier English literature, especially the works of Shakespeare, still relatively unknown in continental Europe.[43] Despite pointing out his deviations from neoclassical standards, Voltaire saw Shakespeare as an example that French writers might emulate, since French drama, despite being more polished, lacked on-stage action. Later, however, as Shakespeare's influence began growing in France, Voltaire tried to set a contrary example with his own plays, decrying what he considered Shakespeare's barbarities. Voltaire may have been present at the funeral of Isaac Newton,[44] and met Newton's niece, Catherine Conduitt.[40] In 1727 he published two essays in English, Upon the Civil Wars of France, Extracted from Curious Manuscripts, and Upon Epic Poetry of the European Nations, from Homer Down to Milton.[40]

text: After two and a half years in exile, Voltaire returned to France, and after a few months living in Dieppe, the authorities permitted him to return to Paris.[45] At a dinner, French mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine proposed buying up the lottery that was organized by the French government to pay off its debts, and Voltaire joined the consortium, earning perhaps a million livres.[46] He invested the money cleverly and on this basis managed to convince the Court of Finances that he was of good conduct and so was able to take control of a capital inheritance from his father that had hitherto been tied up in trust. He was now indisputably rich.[47][48]

text: Further success followed, in 1732, with his play Zaïre, which when published in 1733 carried a dedication to Fawkener that praised English liberty and commerce.[49] At this time he published his views on British attitudes toward government, literature, religion and science in a collection of essays in letter form entitled Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733).[50] In 1734, they were published in French as Lettres philosophiques in Rouen.[51][note 1] Because the publisher released the book without the approval of the royal censor and Voltaire regarded the British constitutional monarchy as more developed and more respectful of human rights (particularly religious tolerance) than its French counterpart, the French publication of Letters caused a huge scandal; the book was publicly burnt and banned, and Voltaire was forced again to flee Paris.[17]

text: Château de Cirey[edit]

text: In 1733, Voltaire met Émilie du Châtelet, a married mother of three who was 12 years his junior and with whom he was to have an affair for 16 years.[53] To avoid arrest after the publication of Letters, Voltaire took refuge at her husband's château at Cirey-sur-Blaise, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine.[54] Voltaire paid for the building's renovation,[55] and Émilie's husband, the Marquis du Châtelet, sometimes stayed at the château with his wife and her lover.[56] The relationship had a significant intellectual element. Voltaire and the Marquise collected over 21,000 books, an enormous number for the time.[citation needed] Together, they studied these books and performed experiments in the natural sciences at Cirey, which included an attempt to determine the nature of fire.[57]

text: Having learned from his previous brushes with the authorities, Voltaire began his habit of keeping out of personal harm's way and denying any awkward responsibility. He continued to write plays, such as Mérope (or La Mérope française) and began his long research into science and history. Again, a main source of inspiration for Voltaire were the years of his British exile, during which he had been strongly influenced by the works of Sir Isaac Newton. Voltaire strongly believed in Newton's theories; he performed experiments in optics at Cirey,[58] and was one of the sources for the famous story of Newton and the apple falling from the tree, which he had learned from Newton's niece in London and first mentioned in his Letters.[40]

text: In the fall of 1735, Voltaire was visited by Francesco Algarotti, who was preparing a book about Newton in Italian.[59] Partly inspired by the visit, the Marquise translated Newton's Latin Principia into French in full, and it remained the definitive French translation into the 21st century.[17] Both she and Voltaire were also curious about the philosophies of Gottfried Leibniz, a contemporary and rival of Newton. While Voltaire remained a firm Newtonian, the Marquise adopted certain aspects of Leibniz's arguments against Newton.[17][60] Voltaire's own book Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (Elements of Newton's Philosophy) made Newton accessible and understandable to a far greater public, and the Marquise wrote a celebratory review in the Journal des savants.[17][61] Voltaire's work was instrumental in bringing about general acceptance of Newton's optical and gravitational theories in France.[17][62]

text: Voltaire and the Marquise also studied history, particularly those persons who had contributed to civilization. Voltaire's second essay in English had been "Essay upon the Civil Wars in France". It was followed by La Henriade, an epic poem on the French King Henri IV, glorifying his attempt to end the Catholic-Protestant massacres with the Edict of Nantes, and by a historical novel on King Charles XII of Sweden. These, along with his Letters on the English mark the beginning of Voltaire's open criticism of intolerance and established religions.[citation needed] Voltaire and the Marquise also explored philosophy, particularly metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with being and with what lies beyond the material realm, such as whether or not there is a God and whether people have souls. Voltaire and the Marquise analysed the Bible and concluded that much of its content was dubious.[63] Voltaire's critical views on religion are reflected in his belief in separation of church and state and religious freedom, ideas that he had formed after his stay in England.

text: In August 1736, Frederick the Great, then Crown Prince of Prussia and a great admirer of Voltaire, initiated a correspondence with him.[64] That December, Voltaire moved to Holland for two months and became acquainted with the scientists Herman Boerhaave and 's Gravesande.[65] From mid-1739 to mid-1740 Voltaire lived largely in Brussels, at first with the Marquise, who was unsuccessfully attempting to pursue a 60-year-old family legal case regarding the ownership of two estates in Limburg.[66] In July 1740, he traveled to the Hague on behalf of Frederick in an attempt to dissuade a dubious publisher, van Duren, from printing without permission Frederick's Anti-Machiavel.[67] In September Voltaire and Frederick (now King) met for the first time in Moyland Castle near Cleves and in November Voltaire was Frederick's guest in Berlin for two weeks;[68] in September 1742 they met in Aix-la-Chapelle.[69] Voltaire was sent to Frederick's court in 1743 by the French government as an envoy and spy to gauge Frederick's military intentions in the War of the Austrian Succession.[70]

text: Though deeply committed to the Marquise, Voltaire by 1744 found life at the château confining. On a visit to Paris that year, he found a new love—his niece. At first, his attraction to Marie Louise Mignot was clearly sexual, as evidenced by his letters to her (only discovered in 1957).[71][72] Much later, they lived together, perhaps platonically, and remained together until Voltaire's death. Meanwhile, the Marquise also took a lover, the Marquis de Saint-Lambert.[73]

text: Prussia[edit]

text: After the death of the Marquise in childbirth in September 1749, Voltaire briefly returned to Paris and in mid-1750 moved to Prussia to the court of Frederick the Great.[74] The Prussian king (with the permission of Louis XV) made him a chamberlain in his household, appointed him to the Order of Merit, and gave him a salary of 20,000 French livres a year.[75] He had rooms at Sanssouci and Charlottenburg Palace.[76] Though life went well at first[77]—in 1751 he completed Micromégas, a piece of science fiction involving ambassadors from another planet witnessing the follies of humankind[78]—his relationship with Frederick the Great began to deteriorate after he was accused of theft and forgery by a Jewish financier, Abraham Hirschel, who had invested in Saxon government bonds, on behalf of Voltaire, at a time when Frederick was involved in sensitive diplomatic negotiations with Saxony.[79]

text: He encountered other difficulties: an argument with Maupertuis, the president of the Berlin Academy of Science and a former rival for Émilie's affections, provoked Voltaire's Diatribe du docteur Akakia ("Diatribe of Doctor Akakia"), which satirized some of Maupertuis's theories and his abuse of power in his persecutions of a mutual acquaintance, Johann Samuel König. This greatly angered Frederick, who ordered all copies of the document burned.[80] On 1 January 1752, Voltaire offered to resign as chamberlain and return his insignia of the Order of Merit; at first, Frederick refused until eventually permitting Voltaire to leave in March.[81] On a slow journey back to France, Voltaire stayed at Leipzig and Gotha for a month each, and Kassel for two weeks, arriving at Frankfurt on 31 May. The following morning, he was detained at the inn where he was staying by Frederick's agents, who held him in the city for over three weeks while they, Voltaire and Frederick argued by letter over the return of a satirical book of poetry Frederick had lent to Voltaire. Marie Louise joined him on 9 June. She and her uncle only left Frankfurt in July after she had defended herself from the unwanted advances of one of Frederick's agents and Voltaire's luggage had been ransacked and valuable items taken.[82]

text: Voltaire's attempts to vilify Frederick for his agents' actions at Frankfurt were largely unsuccessful. Voltaire responded by composing Mémoires pour Servir à la Vie de M. de Voltaire, a work published after his death that paints a largely negative picture of his time spent with Frederick. However, the correspondence between them continued, and though they never met in person again, after the Seven Years' War they largely reconciled.[83]

text: Geneva and Ferney[edit]

text: Voltaire's slow progress toward Paris continued through Mainz, Mannheim, Strasbourg, and Colmar,[84] but in January 1754 Louis XV banned him from Paris,[85] so instead he turned for Geneva, near which he bought a large estate (Les Délices) in early 1755.[86] Though he was received openly at first, the law in Geneva, which banned theatrical performances, and the publication of The Maid of Orleans against his will soured his relationship with Calvinist Genevans.[87] In late 1758, he bought an even larger estate at Ferney, on the French side of the Franco-Swiss border.[88] Early the following year, Voltaire completed and published Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism). This satire on Leibniz's philosophy of optimistic determinism remains the work for which Voltaire is perhaps best known. He would stay in Ferney for most of the remaining 20 years of his life, frequently entertaining distinguished guests, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, Giacomo Casanova, and Edward Gibbon.[89] In 1764, he published one of his best-known philosophical works, the Dictionnaire philosophique, a series of articles mainly on Christian history and dogmas, a few of which were originally written in Berlin.[36]

text: From 1762, he began to champion unjustly persecuted people, the case of Huguenot merchant Jean Calas being the most celebrated.[36] He had been tortured to death in 1763, supposedly because he had murdered his eldest son for wanting to convert to Catholicism. His possessions were confiscated and his two daughters were taken from his widow and were forced into Catholic convents. Voltaire, seeing this as a clear case of religious persecution, managed to overturn the conviction in 1765.[90]

text: Voltaire was initiated into Freemasonry the month before his death. On 4 April 1778 Voltaire accompanied his close friend Benjamin Franklin into La Loge des Neuf Sœurs or Les Neuf Sœurs in Paris, France and became an Entered Apprentice Freemason. "Benjamin Franklin … urged Voltaire to become a freemason; and Voltaire agreed, perhaps only to please Franklin."[91][92][93]

text: Death and burial[edit]

text: In February 1778, Voltaire returned for the first time in over 25 years to Paris, among other reasons to see the opening of his latest tragedy, Irene.[94] The five-day journey was too much for the 83-year-old, and he believed he was about to die on 28 February, writing "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition." However, he recovered, and in March saw a performance of Irene, where he was treated by the audience as a returning hero.[36]

text: He soon became ill again and died on 30 May 1778. The accounts of his deathbed have been numerous and varying, and it has not been possible to establish the details of what precisely occurred. His enemies related that he repented and accepted the last rites given by a Catholic priest, or that he died under great torment, while his adherents told how he was defiant to his last breath.[95] According to one story of his last words, his response to a priest at his deathbed urging him to renounce Satan was "Now is not the time for making new enemies."[96] However, this appears to have originated from a joke first published in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1856, and was only attributed to Voltaire in the 1970s.[97]

text: Because of his well-known criticism of the Church, which he had refused to retract before his death, Voltaire was denied a Christian burial in Paris,[98] but friends and relations managed to bury his body secretly at the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne, where Marie Louise's brother was abbé.[99] His heart and brain were embalmed separately.[100]

text: On 11 July 1791, he was enshrined in the Panthéon, after the National Assembly of France, which regarded him as a forerunner of the French Revolution, had his remains brought back to Paris.[101] It is estimated that a million people attended the procession, which stretched throughout Paris. There was an elaborate ceremony, complete with an orchestra, and the music included a piece that André Grétry had composed especially for the event, which included a part for the "tuba curva" (an instrument that originated in Roman times as the cornu but had recently been revived under a new name[102]).

text: Writings[edit]

text: History[edit]

text: Voltaire had an enormous influence on the development of historiography through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past. Guillaume de Syon argues:

text: Voltaire recast historiography in both factual and analytical terms. Not only did he reject traditional biographies and accounts that claim the work of supernatural forces, but he went so far as to suggest that earlier historiography was rife with falsified evidence and required new investigations at the source. Such an outlook was not unique in that the scientific spirit that 18th-century intellectuals perceived themselves as invested with. A rationalistic approach was key to rewriting history.[103]

text: Voltaire's best-known histories are History of Charles XII (1731), The Age of Louis XIV (1751), and his Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. The Essay on Customs traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, thereby rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. Influenced by Bossuet's Discourse on the Universal History (1682), he was the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and emphasizing economics, culture and political history. He treated Europe as a whole, rather than a collection of nations. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval culture to Middle Eastern civilization, but otherwise was weak on the Middle Ages. Although he repeatedly warned against political bias on the part of the historian, he did not miss many opportunities to expose the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages. Voltaire advised scholars that anything contradicting the normal course of nature was not to be believed. Although he found evil in the historical record, he fervently believed reason and educating the illiterate masses would lead to progress.

text: Voltaire explains his view of historiography in his article on "History" in Diderot's Encyclopédie: "One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture, population." Voltaire's histories imposed the values of the Enlightenment on the past, but at the same time he helped free historiography from antiquarianism, Eurocentrism, religious intolerance and a concentration on great men, diplomacy, and warfare.[104][105] Yale professor Peter Gay says Voltaire wrote "very good history", citing his "scrupulous concern for truths", "careful sifting of evidence", "intelligent selection of what is important", "keen sense of drama", and "grasp of the fact that a whole civilization is a unit of study".[106]

text: Poetry[edit]

text: From an early age, Voltaire displayed a talent for writing verse and his first published work was poetry. He wrote two book-long epic poems, including the first ever written in French, the Henriade, and later, The Maid of Orleans, besides many other smaller pieces.[citation needed]

text: The Henriade was written in imitation of Virgil, using the alexandrine couplet reformed and rendered monotonous for modern readers but it was a huge success in the 18th and early 19th century, with sixty-five editions and translations into several languages. The epic poem transformed French King Henry IV into a national hero for his attempts at instituting tolerance with his Edict of Nantes. La Pucelle, on the other hand, is a burlesque on the legend of Joan of Arc. Voltaire's minor poems are generally considered superior to either of these two works.[citation needed]

text: Prose[edit]

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text: Many of Voltaire's prose works and romances, usually composed as pamphlets, were written as polemics. Candide attacks the passivity inspired by Leibniz's philosophy of optimism; L'Homme aux quarante ecus (The Man of Forty Pieces of Silver), certain social and political ways of the time; Zadig and others, the received forms of moral and metaphysical orthodoxy; and some were written to deride the Bible. In these works, Voltaire's ironic style, free of exaggeration, is apparent, particularly the restraint and simplicity of the verbal treatment. Candide in particular is the best example of his style. Voltaire also has, in common with Jonathan Swift, the distinction of paving the way for science fiction's philosophical irony, particularly in his Micromégas and the vignette Plato's Dream (1756).

text: In general, his criticism and miscellaneous writing show a similar style to Voltaire's other works. Almost all of his more substantive works, whether in verse or prose, are preceded by prefaces of one sort or another, which are models of his caustic yet conversational tone. In a vast variety of nondescript pamphlets and writings, he displays his skills at journalism. In pure literary criticism his principal work is the Commentaire sur Corneille, although he wrote many more similar works—sometimes (as in his Life and Notices of Molière) independently and sometimes as part of his Siècles.

text: Voltaire's works, especially his private letters, frequently contain the word "l'infâme" and the expression "écrasez l'infâme", or "crush the infamous". The phrase refers to abuses of the people by royalty and the clergy that Voltaire saw around him, and the superstition and intolerance that the clergy bred within the people.[107] He had felt these effects in his own exiles, the burnings of his books and those of many others, and in the hideous sufferings of Jean Calas and François-Jean de la Barre. He stated in one of his most famous quotes that "Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them."[108]

text: The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book De l'esprit, but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire. Her interpretation does capture the spirit of Voltaire's attitude towards Helvetius; it had been said Hall's summary was inspired by a quotation found in a 1770 Voltaire letter to an Abbot le Riche, in which he was reported to have said, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."[109] Nevertheless, scholars believe there must have again been misinterpretation, as the letter does not seem to contain any such quote.[110]

text: Voltaire's first major philosophical work in his battle against "l'infâme" was the Traité sur la tolérance (Treatise on Tolerance), exposing the Calas affair, along with the tolerance exercised by other faiths and in other eras (for example, by the Jews, the Romans, the Greeks and the Chinese). Then, in his Dictionnaire philosophique, containing such articles as "Abraham", "Genesis", "Church Council", he wrote about what he perceived as the human origins of dogmas and beliefs, as well as inhuman behavior of religious and political institutions in shedding blood over the quarrels of competing sects. Amongst other targets, Voltaire criticized France's colonial policy in North America, dismissing the vast territory of New France as "a few acres of snow" ("quelques arpents de neige").

text: Letters[edit]

text: Voltaire also engaged in an enormous amount of private correspondence during his life, totalling over 20,000 letters. Theodore Besterman's collected edition of these letters, completed only in 1964, fills 102 volumes.[111] One historian called the letters "a feast not only of wit and eloquence but of warm friendship, humane feeling, and incisive thought."[112]

text: In Voltaire's correspondence with Catherine the Great he derided democracy. He wrote, "Almost nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude."[113]

text: Religious views[edit]

text:
Part of a series on

Criticism of religion

By religion

Buddhism
Christianity
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Catholic

Catholicism
Opus Dei

Latter Day Saint movement

Mormonism

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Protestantism
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Unification Church
Westboro Baptist Church

Hinduism
Islam

Islamism
Twelver Shi’ism
Wahhabism

Jainism
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New religious movement
Scientology
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By religious figure

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By text

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Religious violence

Buddhism
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By Christians

Sectarian violence
Segregation
Terrorism

Christian
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In Islam
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Related topics

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text: Like other key Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire was a deist, expressing the idea: "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."[114][115] Voltaire held mixed views of the Abrahamic religions but had a favourable view of Hinduism.

text: In a 1763 essay, Voltaire supported the toleration of other religions and ethnicities: "It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?"[116]

text: In one of his many denunciations of priests of every religious sect, Voltaire describes them as those who "rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God."[117]

text: Christianity[edit]

text: In a letter to Frederick II, King of Prussia, dated 5 January 1767, he wrote about Christianity:

text:
La nôtre [religion] est sans contredit la plus ridicule, la plus absurde, et la plus sanguinaire qui ait jamais infecté le monde.[118]
"Our [religion] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world. Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service by extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among honest people, among men who think, among those who wish to think. … My one regret in dying is that I cannot aid you in this noble enterprise, the finest and most respectable which the human mind can point out.."[119][120]

text: In La bible enfin expliquée, he expressed the following attitude to lay reading of the Bible:

text: It is characteristic of fanatics who read the holy scriptures to tell themselves: God killed, so I must kill; Abraham lied, Jacob deceived, Rachel stole: so I must steal, deceive, lie. But, wretch, you are neither Rachel, nor Jacob, nor Abraham, nor God; you are just a mad fool, and the popes who forbade the reading of the Bible were extremely wise.[121]

text: Voltaire's opinion of the Christian Bible was mixed. Although influenced by Socinian works such as the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, Voltaire's skeptical attitude to the Bible separated him from Unitarian theologians like Fausto Sozzini or even Biblical-political writers like John Locke.[122] His statements on religion also brought down on him the fury of the Jesuits and in particular Claude-Adrien Nonnotte.[123][124][125][126] This did not hinder his religious practice, though it did win for him a bad reputation in certain religious circles. The deeply Christian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father the year of Voltaire's death, saying, "The arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket ...".[127] Voltaire was later deemed to influence Edward Gibbon in claiming that Christianity was a contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire, in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

text: As Christianity advances, disasters befall the [Roman] empire—arts, science, literature, decay—barbarism and all its revolting concomitants are made to seem the consequences of its decisive triumph—and the unwary reader is conducted, with matchless dexterity, to the desired conclusion—the abominable Manicheism of Candide, and, in fact, of all the productions of Voltaire's historic school—viz., "that instead of being a merciful, ameliorating, and benignant visitation, the religion of Christians would rather seem to be a scourge sent on man by the author of all evil."[128]

text: However, Voltaire also acknowledged the self-sacrifice of Christians. He wrote: "Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity."[129] Yet "His hatred of religion increased with the passage of years. The attack, launched at first against clericalism and theocracy, ended in a furious assault upon Holy Scripture, the dogmas of the Church, and even upon the person of Jesus Christ Himself, who was depicted now as a degenerate".[130] The reasoning of which may be summed up in his well-known quote, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities".

text: Judaism[edit]

text: According to Orthodox rabbi Joseph Telushkin, the most significant of Enlightenment hostility against Judaism was found in Voltaire;[131] thirty of the 118 articles in his Dictionnaire philosophique dealt with Jews and described them in consistently negative ways.[132][133]

text: On the other hand, Peter Gay, a contemporary authority on the Enlightenment,[131] also points to Voltaire's remarks (for instance, that the Jews were more tolerant than the Christians) in the Traité sur la tolérance and surmises that "Voltaire struck at the Jews to strike at Christianity". Whatever anti-semitism Voltaire may have felt, Gay suggests, derived from negative personal experience.[134] Bertram Schwarzbach's far more detailed studies of Voltaire's dealings with Jewish people throughout his life concluded that he was anti-biblical, not anti-semitic. His remarks on the Jews and their "superstitions" were essentially no different from his remarks on Christians.[135]

text: Telushkin states that Voltaire did not limit his attack to aspects of Judaism that Christianity used as a foundation, repeatedly making it clear that he despised Jews.[131] Arthur Hertzberg claims that Gay's second suggestion is also untenable, as Voltaire himself denied its validity when he remarked that he had "forgotten about much larger bankruptcies through Christians".[clarification needed][136]

text: Some authors link Voltaire's anti-Judaism to his polygenism. According to Joxe Azurmendi this anti-Judaism has a relative importance in Voltaire's philosophy of history. However, Voltaire's anti-Judaism influences later authors like Ernest Renan.[137]

text: According to the historian Will Durant, Voltaire had initially condemned the persecution of Jews on several occasions including in his work Henriade.[138] As stated by Durant, Voltaire had praised the simplicity, sobriety, regularity, and industry of Jews. However, subsequently, Voltaire had become strongly anti-Semitic after some regrettable personal financial transactions and quarrels with Jewish financiers. In his Essai sur les moeurs Voltaire had denounced the ancient Hebrews using strong language; a Catholic priest had protested against this censure. The anti-Semitic passages in Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique were criticized by Issac Pinto in 1762. Subsequently, Voltaire agreed with the criticism of his anti-Semitic views and stated that he had been "wrong to attribute to a whole nation the vices of some individuals";[139] he also promised to revise the objectionable passages for forthcoming editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique, but failed to do so.[139]

text: Islam[edit]

text: Voltaire's views about Islam remained negative; he considered the Qur'an to be ignorant of the laws of physics.[140] In a 1740 letter to Frederick II of Prussia, Voltaire ascribes to Muhammad a brutality that "is assuredly nothing any man can excuse" and suggests that his following stemmed from superstition and lack of enlightenment. Voltaire continued in his letter, "But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him." – Referring to Muhammad, in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (December 1740), published in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 7 (1869), edited by Georges Avenel, p. 105[141]

text: In 1748, after having read Henri de Boulainvilliers and George Sale,[142] he wrote again about Mohammed and Islam in an article, "De l'Alcoran et de Mahomet" (On the Quran and on Mohammed). In the article, Voltaire maintained that Mohammed was a "sublime charlatan"[143] Drawing also on complementary information in the "Oriental Library" of Herbelot, Voltaire, according to René Pomeau, had a judgement of the Qur'an where he found the book in spite of "the contradictions, the absurdities, the anachronisms", "rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art".[144][145][146][147] Thus he "henceforward conceded" [147] that "if his book was bad for our times and for us, it was very good for his contemporaries, and his religion even more so. It must be admitted that he removed almost all of Asia from idolatry" and that "it was difficult for such a simple and wise religion, taught by a man who was constantly victorious, could hardly fail to subjugate a portion of the earth." He considered that "its civil laws are good; its dogma is admirable which it has in common with ours" but that "his means are shocking; deception and murder".[148]

text: Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations[edit]

text: Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations (French: Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations) is a work of Voltaire, published for the first time in its entirety in 1756. In this work, Voltaire deals with the history of Europe before Charlemagne to the dawn of the age of Louis XIV, also evoking that of the colonies and the East. As a historian he devoted several chapters to Islam,[149][150][151] Voltaire highlighted the Arabian, Turkish courts, and conducts.[147][152][153][152] Here he called Mohammed a "poet", and furthermore he was not an illiterate.[154] As a "legislator" who "changed the face of part of Europe, one half of Asia",[155][156][157] In the chapter VI, Voltaire finds similarities Arabs and ancient Hebrews, that they both kept running to battle in the name of god, and sharing the passion for booty and spoils.[158] Voltaire continues that, "It is to be believed that Mohammed, like all enthusiasts, violently struck by his ideas, first presented them in good faith, strengthened them with fantasy, fooled himself in fooling others, and supported through necessary deceptions a doctrine which he considered good."[159][160] He thus compares "the genius of the Arab people" with "the genius of the ancient Romans".[161]

text: The Drama Mahomet[edit]

text: The tragedy Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet (French: Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete) was written in 1736 by Voltaire. The play is a study of religious fanaticism and self-serving manipulation. The character Muhammad orders the murder of his critics.[162] Voltaire described the play as "written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect".[163]

text: Voltaire described Muhammad as an "impostor", a " false prophet", a "fanatic" and a "hypocrite".[164][165] Defending the play, Voltaire said that he "tried to show in it into what horrible excesses fanaticism, led by an impostor, can plunge weak minds".[166]

text: When Voltaire wrote in 1742 to César de Missy, he described Mohammed as a "deceitful character."[167][168]

text: In his play, Mohammed was "whatever trickery can invent that is most atrocious and whatever fanaticism can accomplish that is most horrifying. Mahomet here is nothing other than Tartuffe with armies at his command."[169][170] After later having judged that he had made Mohammed in his play "somewhat nastier than he really was",[171] Voltaire claims that Muhammad stole the idea of an angel weighing both men and women from Zoroastrians, who are often referred to as "Magi". Voltaire continues about Islam that

text: "Nothing is more terrible than a people who, having nothing to lose, fight in the united spirit of rapine and of religion."[172]

text: In a 1745 letter recommending the play to Pope Benedict XIV, Voltaire described Muhammad as "the founder of a false and barbarous sect" and "a false prophet." Voltaire wrote that "Your holiness will pardon the liberty taken by one of the lowest of the faithful, though a zealous admirer of virtue, of submitting to the head of the true religion this performance, written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect. To whom could I with more propriety inscribe a satire on the cruelty and errors of a false prophet, than to the vicar and representative of a God of truth and mercy?".[173][174] His view was modified slightly for Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations, although they remained negative.[175][176][177][178] In 1751, Voltaire performed his play Mohamet once again, with great success.[179]

text: Hinduism[edit]

text: Commenting on the sacred texts of the Hindus, the Vedas, Voltaire observed:

text: The Veda was the most precious gift for which the West had ever been indebted to the East.[180]

text: He regarded Hindus as "[a] peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves".[181] Voltaire was himself a supporter of animal rights and was a vegetarian.[182] He used the antiquity of Hinduism to land what he saw as a devastating blow to the Bible's claims and acknowledged that the Hindus' treatment of animals showed a shaming alternative to the immorality of European imperialists.[183]

text: Views on race and slavery[edit]

text: Voltaire rejected the biblical Adam and Eve story and was a polygenist who speculated that each race had entirely separate origins.[184][185] According to William Cohen, like most other polygenists, Voltaire believed that because of their different origins blacks did not entirely share the natural humanity of whites.[186] According to David Allen Harvey, Voltaire often invoked racial differences as a means to attack religious orthodoxy, and the Biblical account of creation.[187]

text: His most famous remark on slavery is found in Candide, where the hero is horrified to learn "at what price we eat sugar in Europe" after coming across a slave in French Guinea who has been mutilated for escaping, who opines that, if all human beings have common origins as the Bible taught, it makes them cousins, concluding that "no one could treat their relatives more horribly". Elsewhere, he wrote caustically about "whites and Christians [who] proceed to purchase negroes cheaply, in order to sell them dear in America". Voltaire has been accused of supporting the slave trade as per a letter attributed to him,[188][189][190] although it has been suggested that this letter is a forgery "since no satisfying source attests to the letter's existence."[191]

text: In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire endorses Montesquieu's criticism of the slave trade:

text: Montesquieu was almost always in error with the learned, because he was not learned, but he was almost always right against the fanatics and the promoters of slavery.[192]

text: Appreciation and influence[edit]

text: According to Victor Hugo: "To name Voltaire is to characterize the entire eighteenth century."[193] Goethe regarded Voltaire to be the greatest literary figure in modern times, and possibly of all times.[194] According to Diderot, Voltaire's influence on posterity would extend far into the future.[195][note 2]

text: Napoleon commented that till he was sixteen he "would have fought for Rousseau against the friends of Voltaire, today it is the opposite...The more I read Voltaire the more I love him. He is a man always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic."[196] Frederick the Great commented on his good fortune for having lived in the age of Voltaire, and corresponded with him throughout his reign until Voltaire's death.[197] Catherine the Great had been reading Voltaire for sixteen years prior to becoming Empress of Russia in 1762.[197][198] In October 1763, she began a correspondence with the philosopher that continued till his death. The content of these letters has been described as being akin to a student writing to a teacher.[199] Upon Voltaire's death, the Empress purchased his library, which was then transported and placed in The Hermitage.[200]

text: In England, Voltaire's views influenced Godwin, Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Byron, and Shelley.[194] Macaulay made note of the fear that Voltaire's very name incited in tyrants and fanatics.[201][note 3]

text: In his native Paris, Voltaire was viewed as the defender of Jean Calas and Pierre Sirven.[194] Although he failed in securing the annulment of la Barre's execution for "blasphemies" against Christianity, despite a protracted campaign, the criminal code that sanctioned the execution was revised during Voltaire's lifetime.[202] In 1764, Voltaire successfully intervened and secured the release of Claude Chamont for the crime of attending Protestant services. When Comte de Lally was executed for treason in 1766, Voltaire wrote a 300-page document absolving de Lally. Subsequently, in 1778, the judgment against de Lally was expunged just before Voltaire's death. The Genevan Protestant minister Pomaret once said to Voltaire, "You seem to attack Christianity, and yet you do the work of a Christian."[203] Frederick the Great noted the significance of a philosopher capable of influencing judges to change their unjust decisions, commenting that this alone is sufficient to ensure the prominence of Voltaire as a humanitarian.[203]

text: Most architects of modern America were adherents of Voltaire's views.[194] According to Will Durant:

text: Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire; he was for his country both Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution.[193] He was first and best in his time in his conception and writing of history, in the grace of his poetry, in the charm and wit of his prose, in the range of his thought and his influence. His spirit moved like a flame over the continent and the century, and stirs a million souls in every generation.[204]

text: Voltaire and Rousseau[edit]

text: Voltaire's junior contemporary Jean Jacques Rousseau commented on how Voltaire's book Letters on the English played a great role in his intellectual development.[205] Having written some literary works and also some music, in December 1745 Rousseau wrote a letter introducing himself to Voltaire, who was by then the most prominent literary figure in France, to which Voltaire replied with a polite response. Subsequently, when Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his book Discourse on Inequality, Voltaire replied, noting his disagreement with the views expressed in the book:

text: No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on four paws [marcher à quatre pattes]. However, as it is more than sixty years since I lost that habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it.[206]

text: Subsequently, commenting on Rousseau's romantic novel Julie, or the New Heloise, Voltaire stated:

text: No more about Jean-Jacques' romance if you please. I have read it, to my sorrow, and it would be to his if I had time to say what I think of this silly book.[207]

text: Voltaire speculated that the first half of Julie had been written in a brothel and the second half in a lunatic asylum.[208] In his Lettres sur La Nouvelle Heloise, written under a pseudonym, Voltaire offered criticism highlighting grammatical mistakes in the book.

text: Paris recognized Voltaire's hand and judged the patriarch to be bitten by jealousy.[207]

text: In reviewing Rousseau's book Emile after its publication, Voltaire dismissed it as "a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known." However, he expressed admiration for the section in this book titled Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, calling it "fifty good pages...it is regrettable that they should have been written by...such a knave." [209] He went on to predict that Emile would be forgotten after a month.[208]

text: In 1764, Rousseau published Lettres de la montagne, containing nine letters on religion and politics. In the fifth letter he wondered why Voltaire had not been able to imbue the Genevan councilors, who frequently met him, "with that spirit of tolerance which he preaches without cease, and of which he sometimes has need". The letter continued with an imaginary speech delivered by Voltaire, imitating his literary style, in which he accepts authorship for the book Sermon of the Fifty—a book whose authorship Voltaire had repeatedly denied because it contained many heresies.[210]

text: In 1772, when a priest sent Rousseau a pamphlet denouncing Voltaire, Rousseau responded with a defense of Voltaire:

text: He has said and done so many good things that we should draw the curtain over his irregularities.[210]

text: In 1778, when Voltaire was given unprecedented honors at the Théâtre-Français,[211] an acquaintance of Rousseau ridiculed the event. This was met by a sharp retort from Rousseau:

text: How dare you mock the honors rendered to Voltaire in the temple of which he is the god, and by the priests who for fifty years have been living off his masterpieces?[212]

text: On 2 July 1778, Rousseau died one month after Voltaire's death.[213] In October 1794, Rousseau's remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed near the remains of Voltaire.[214][note 4]

text: Louis XVI, while incarcerated in the Temple, had remarked that Rousseau and Voltaire had "destroyed France", by which he meant his dynasty.[216][note 5]

text: Legacy[edit]

text: Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the Church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses.[218] Voltaire long thought only an enlightened monarch could bring about change, given the social structures of the time and the extremely high rates of illiteracy, and that it was in the king's rational interest to improve the education and welfare of his subjects. But his disappointments and disillusions with Frederick the Great changed his philosophy somewhat, and soon gave birth to one of his most enduring works, his novella Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism, 1759), which ends with a new conclusion: "It is up to us to cultivate our garden." His most polemical and ferocious attacks on intolerance and religious persecutions indeed began to appear a few years later. Candide was also burned and Voltaire jokingly claimed the actual author was a certain 'Demad' in a letter, where he reaffirmed the main polemical stances of the text.[219]

text: He is remembered and honoured in France as a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought for civil rights (as the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion) and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the Ancien Régime. The Ancien Régime involved an unfair balance of power and taxes between the three Estates: clergy and nobles on one side, the commoners and middle class, who were burdened with most of the taxes, on the other. He particularly had admiration for the ethics and government as exemplified by the Chinese philosopher Confucius.[220]

text: Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, such as "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer" ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work on The Three Impostors. But far from being the cynical remark it is often taken for, it was meant as a retort to atheistic opponents such as d'Holbach, Grimm, and others.[221] He has had his detractors among his later colleagues. The Scottish Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle argued that "Voltaire read history, not with the eye of devout seer or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti-catholic spectacles."[222]

text: The town of Ferney, where Voltaire lived out the last 20 years of his life, was officially named Ferney-Voltaire in honour of its most famous resident in 1878.[223] His château is a museum. Voltaire's library is preserved intact in the National Library of Russia at Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the Zurich of 1916, the theatre and performance group who would become the early avant-garde movement Dada named their theater The Cabaret Voltaire. A late-20th-century industrial music group then named themselves after the theater. Astronomers have bestowed his name to the Voltaire crater on Deimos and the asteroid 5676 Voltaire.[224]

text: Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, as he was reported to have drunk it 50–72 times per day. It has been suggested that high amounts of caffeine acted as a mental stimulant to his creativity.[225] His great-grand-niece was the mother of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic philosopher and Jesuit priest.[226][227] His book Candide was listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, by Martin Seymour-Smith.

text: In the 1950s, the bibliographer and translator Theodore Besterman started to collect, transcribe and publish all of Voltaire's writings.[228] He founded the Voltaire Institute and Museum in Geneva where he began publishing collected volumes of Voltaire's correspondence.[228] On his death in 1976, he left his collection to the University of Oxford, where the Voltaire Foundation became established as a department.[229][230] The Foundation has continued to publish the Complete Works of Voltaire, a complete chronological series which is expected to reach completion in 2018, reaching around 200 volumes, fifty years after the series began.[230][231] It also publishes the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, begun by Bestermann as Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, which has reached more than 500 volumes.[230]

text: Chronology[edit]

text: Works[edit]

text: Philosophical works[edit]

text:
Letters concerning the English nation (London, 1733) (French version entitled Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais, Rouen, 1734), revised as Letters on the English (circa 1778)
Le Mondain (1736)
Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)
Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1745)
Zadig (1747)
Micromégas (1752)
Candide (1759)
Traité sur la tolérance (1763)
Ce qui plaît aux dames (1764)
Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
Questions sur les Miracles (1765)
Idées républicaines (1765)
L'Ingénu (1767)
La Princesse de Babylone (1768)
Des singularités de la nature (1768)

text: Plays[edit]

text: Voltaire wrote between fifty and sixty plays, including a few unfinished ones.[232] Among them are these:

text:
Œdipe (1718)
Mariamne (1724)
Éryphile (1732)
Zaïre (1732)
Mahomet (1741)
Mérope (1743)
La princesse de Navarre (1745)
Nanine (1749)
L'Orphelin de la Chine (1755)[220][233]
Socrate (published 1759)
La Femme Qui a Raison (1759)
Irène (1778)

text: Historical[edit]

text:
History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731)
The Age of Louis XIV (1751)
The Age of Louis XV (1746–1752)
Annals of the Empire – Charlemagne, AD 742 – Henry VII 1313, Vol. I (1754)
Annals of the Empire – Louis of Bavaria, 1315 to Ferdinand II 1631 Vol. II (1754)
Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations (1756)
History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great (Vol. I 1759; Vol. II 1763)


document_title: Persian Empire

question_text: in 550 bc which leader began the persian empire

root

text: Persian Empire

text: Achaemenids

text: The first dynasty of the Persian Empire was created by Achaemenids, established by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC with the conquest of Median, Lydian and Babylonian empires.[1] It covered much of the Ancient world when it was conquered by Alexander the Great. Persepolis is the most famous historical site related to Persian Empire in the Achaemenid era and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.

tag: p

text: Parthians and Sasanians

text: From 247 BC to 224 AD, Persia was ruled by the Parthian Empire, which supplanted the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, and then by the Sassanian Empire, which ruled up until the mid-7th century.[2]

text: The Persian Empire in the Sasanian era was interrupted by the Arab conquest of Persia in 651 AD, establishing the even larger Islamic caliphate, and later by the Mongol invasion. The main religion of ancient Persia was the native Zoroastrianism, but after the seventh century, it was slowly replaced by Islam which achieved a majority in the 10th century.

text: Safavids

text: The Safavid Empire was the first Persian Empire established after the Arab conquest of Persia by Shah Ismail I. From their base in Ardabil, the Safavid Persians established control over parts of Greater Persia/Iran and reasserted the Persian identity of the region, becoming the first native Persian dynasty since the Sasanian Empire to establish a unified Persian state.

text: Literature, art and architecture flourished in the Safavid era once again, and it is often cited as the "rebirth of the Persian Empire". Safavids also announced Shia Islam as the official religion in the empire versus the Sunni Islam in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire.

text: List of the dynasties described as a Persian Empire

text:
Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC)
Sasanian Empire (224–651 AD)
Safavid dynasty (1501–1736 AD)
Afsharid dynasty (1736–1796 AD)
Qajar dynasty (1785–1925 AD)

tag: ul

text:
Extent of the first Persian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire

Extent of the Sasanian Empire in 621

The maximum extent of the Safavid Empire under Shah Abbas I

Extent of the Afsharid Empire under Nader Shah


document_title: WhatsApp

question_text: who is the inventor of what's app

question_tokens: who is the inventor of what 's app

text: WhatsApp

text: History

text: WhatsApp, was incorporated in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo! . After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo traveled to South America as a break from work.[19] At one point they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.[19] For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the App Store would soon create an industry of apps, Koum started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss ".... having statuses next to individual names of the people", but this was not possible without an iPhone developer. Fishman found a Russian developer on RentACoder.com, Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum. Koum named the app "WhatsApp" to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, because early versions of WhatsApp often crashed or got stuck at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".[19]

text: In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app. Koum changed WhatsApp so that when a user's status is changed, everyone in the user's network would be notified.[19] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000. Acton was still unemployed and managing another startup, and he decided to join the company.[19] In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends in Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined on November 1.[19] After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired a friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.[19]

text: WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to WhatsApp for the iPhone. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.[19]

text: In April 2011, Sequoia Capital was the only venture investor in WhatsApp and paid approximately $8 million for more than 15 percent of the company, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[20][21][22]

text: By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.[19]

text: In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month.[23] As of April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos were being shared daily, and the messaging system was handling more than 10 billion messages each day.[24] On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day.[25][26] With 65 million active users representing 10% of the total worldwide users, India has the largest number of consumers.[27]

text: Facebook subsidiary (2014–present)

text: On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation,[28] Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.[15] At the time, the acquisition was the largest purchase of a venture-backed company in history.[14] Sequoia Capital received an approximate 50x return on its initial investment.[29] Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and (advised by Morgan Stanley) an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders, Koum and Acton.[30] Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing.[15] Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.[31]

text: The acquisition caused a considerable number of users to move, or try out other message services as well. Telegram claimed to have seen 8 million additional downloads of its app.[32] Line claimed to have seen 2 million new users for its service.[33]

text: At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision.[34][35] According to a TechCrunch article, Zuckerberg's vision for Internet.org was as follows: "The idea, he said, is to develop a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use – 'a 911 for the internet.' These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. Providing a bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts – users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just don’t see the point of why they would pay for those data services. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to paying for more services like this – or so the hope goes."[34]

text: On May 9, 2014, the government of Iran announced that it had proposed to block the access to WhatsApp service to Iranian residents. "The reason for this is the assumption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist," said Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, head of the country's Committee on Internet Crimes. Subsequently, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani issued an order to the Ministry of ICT to stop filtering WhatsApp.[36][37]

text: Just three days after announcing that WhatsApp had been purchased by Facebook, Koum said they were working to introduce voice calls in the coming months. He also advanced that new mobile phones would be sold in Germany with the WhatsApp brand, as their main goal was to be in all smartphones.[38]

text: In August 2014, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app, with more than 600 million active users.[25] By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day.[39] In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry will lose a combined total of $386 billion because of OTT services like WhatsApp and Skype.[40] That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users.[41][42] By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million,[43] and by February 2016 it had grown to one billion.[16]

text: As of November 30, 2015, the Android client for WhatsApp started making links to another messenger called Telegram unclickable and uncopyable.[44][45][46] This is an active block, as confirmed by multiple sources, rather than a bug,[46] and the Android source code which recognises Telegram URLs has been identified.[46] URLs with "telegram" as domain-name are targeted actively and explicitly – the word "telegram" appears in the code.[46] This functioning risks being considered anti-competitive,[44][45][46] and has not been explained by WhatsApp.

text: Recent (2016-present)

text: On January 18, 2016, WhatsApp's founder Jan Koum announced that the service would no longer charge their users a $1 annual subscription fee in an effort to remove a barrier faced by some users who do not have a credit card to pay for the service.[47][48] He also explained that the app would not display any third party advertisement and instead would bring new features such as the ability to communicate with business organizations.[16][49]

text: By June 2016, more than 100 million voice calls are made per day on WhatsApp according to a post on the company's blog.[50]

text: On November 10, 2016, WhatsApp has started rolling out two-step verification feature for users on Android beta. This feature will add more security to your account, officials said. After enabling this feature, users will also get an option to add their email address for further protection.[51] Also in November 2016, Facebook ceased collecting WhatsApp data for advertising in Europe.[52]

text: On February 24, 2017, (WhatsApp's 8th birthday) WhatsApp launches new Status feature that offering similar to Snapchat.[53]

text: On May 18, 2017, it was reported that the European Commission was fining Facebook €110 million for "misleading" it during the 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. The Commission alleged that in 2014, when Facebook acquired the messaging app, it "falsely claimed it was technically impossible to automatically combine user information from Facebook and WhatsApp." However, in the summer of 2016 WhatsApp had begun sharing user information with its parent company, allowing information such as phone numbers to be used for targeted Facebook advertisements. Facebook acknowledged the breach, but said the errors in their 2014 filings were "not intentional."[52]

text: In September 2017 WhatsApp announced a forthcoming business platform which will enable companies to provide customer service to users at scale.[13] Airlines KLM and Aeroméxico both announced their participation in the testing;[54][55] both airlines had previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.

text: Client markets

text: Until 2017 WhatsApp positioned itself as a solution for a single party with a single smartphone to communicate with another such party, enabling small businesses to use the platform to communicate with customers,[56] but not at scale (in a contact center environment, e.g.). However in September 2017 WhatsApp announced what had long been rumored,[57][58] that they are building and testing new tools for businesses to use WhatsApp:[59]

text:
a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies and
an Enterprise Solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a global base of customers, like airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks

text: Platform support

text: After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. In January 2010, support for BlackBerry smartphones was added, and subsequently for Symbian OS in May 2010 and for Android OS in August 2010. In August 2011 a beta for Nokia's non-smartphone OS Series 40 was added. A month later support for Windows Phone was added, followed by BlackBerry 10 in March 2013.[60] In April 2015, support for Samsung's Tizen OS was added.[61] An unofficial port has been released for the MeeGo-based Nokia N9 called Wazapp,[62] as well as a port for the Maemo-based Nokia N900 called Yappari.[63]

text: The oldest device capable of running WhatsApp is the Symbian-based Nokia N95 released in March 2007.

text: In August 2014, WhatsApp released an update to its Android app, adding support for Android Wear smartwatches.[64]

text: In 2014 an unofficial open source plug-in called whatsapp-purple was released for Pidgin, implementing its XMPP and making it possible to use WhatsApp on a Windows or Linux PC.[65][third-party source needed] WhatsApp responded by automatically blocking phone numbers that connected to WhatsApp using this plug-in.[citation needed]

text: On January 21, 2015, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Web, a web client which can be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile device's connection.[66]

text: On February 26, 2016, WhatsApp announced they would cease support for BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), Series 40 and Symbian S60, as well as older versions of Android (2.2), Windows Phone (7.0) and iOS (6), by the end of 2016.[67] BlackBerry, Series 40 and Symbian support was since then extended further to June 30, 2017.[68] In June 2017 support for BlackBerry and Series 40 was once again extended until the end of 2017, while Symbian was dropped.[69]

text: WhatsApp Web

text: WhatsApp was officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: "Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone". The WhatsApp user's handset must still be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. All major desktop browsers are supported except for Microsoft Internet Explorer. WhatsApp Web's user interface is based on the default Android one.

text: As of January 21, 2015, the desktop version was only available to Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone users. Later on, it also added support for iOS, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia S60 (Symbian).[70][71]

text: An unofficial derivative called WhatsAppTime has been developed, which is a standard Win32 application for PCs and supports notifications through the Windows notification area.[72] There are similar solutions for macOS, such as the open-source ChitChat[73][74][75] and multiple wrappers available in the App Store.[citation needed]

text: Windows and Mac

text: On May 10, 2016, the messaging service was introduced for both Windows and macOS operating systems. Similar to the WhatsApp Web format, the app, which will be synced with a user's mobile device, is available for download on the website. It supports OS versions of Windows 8 and OS X 10.9 and higher.[76][77]

text: Technical

text: WhatsApp uses a customized version of the open standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).[78] Upon installation, it creates a user account using one's phone number as the username (Jabber ID: [phone number]@s.whatsapp.net).

text: WhatsApp software automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device's address book with its central database of WhatsApp users to automatically add contacts to the user's WhatsApp contact list. Previously the Android and Nokia Series 40 versions used an MD5-hashed, reversed-version of the phone's IMEI as password,[79] while the iOS version used the phone's Wi-Fi MAC address instead of IMEI.[80][81] A 2012 update now generates a random password on the server side.[82]

text: Some Dual SIM devices may not be compatible with WhatsApp, though there are some workarounds for this.[83]

text: In January 2015, WhatsApp introduced a voice calling feature; this helped WhatsApp to attract a completely different segment of the user population.[84] On November 14, 2016, Whatsapp added video calling feature for users across Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices.[85][86]

text: Multimedia messages are sent by uploading the image, audio or video to be sent to an HTTP server and then sending a link to the content along with its Base64 encoded thumbnail (if applicable).[87]

text: WhatsApp follows a "store and forward" mechanism for exchanging messages between two users. When a user sends a message, it first travels to the WhatsApp server where it is stored. Then the server repeatedly requests the receiver acknowledge receipt of the message. As soon as the message is acknowledged, the server drops the message; it is no longer available in database of server. WhatsApp server keeps the message only for 30 days in its database when it is not delivered (when the receiver is not active on WhatsApp for 30 days).[88][self-published source?]

text: End-to-end encryption

text: On November 18, 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the encryption protocol used in Signal into each WhatsApp client platform.[89] Open Whisper Systems said that they had already incorporated the protocol into the latest WhatsApp client for Android, and that support for other clients, group/media messages, and key verification would be coming soon after.[90] WhatsApp confirmed the partnership to reporters, but there was no announcement or documentation about the encryption feature on the official website, and further requests for comment were declined.[91] In April 2015, German magazine Heise Security used ARP spoofing to confirm that the protocol had been implemented for Android-to-Android messages, and that WhatsApp messages from or to iPhones running iOS were still not end-to-end encrypted.[92] They expressed the concern that regular WhatsApp users still could not tell the difference between end-to-end encrypted messages and regular messages.[92] On April 5, 2016, WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to "every form of communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other's keys.[17][93] Users were also given the option to enable a trust on first use mechanism in order to be notified if a correspondent's key changes.[94] According to a white paper that was released along with the announcement, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol.[95] WhatsApp calls are encrypted with SRTP, and all client-server communications are "layered within a separate encrypted channel".[95] The Signal Protocol library used by WhatsApp is open-source and published under the GPLv3 license.[95][96]

text: Cade Metz, writing in Wired, said "WhatsApp, more than any company before it, has taken encryption to the masses."[10]

text: WhatsApp Payments

text: WhatsApp Payments is a peer to peer money transfer feature that is set to launch in India. WhatsApp has received permission from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to enter into partnership with multiple banks in July, 2017[97] to allow users to make in-app payments and money transfers using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).[98] UPI enables account-to-account transfers from a mobile app without having any details of the beneficiary's bank.[99]

text: Reception and criticism

text: Security and privacy

text: On May 20, 2011, an unconfirmed security researcher from the Netherlands under the pseudonym "WhatsappHack" published, to the Dutch websites Tweakers.net and GeenStijl, a method by which WhatsApp accounts could be hijacked. The researcher noticed a flaw in the authentication process, which allowed the researcher to hijack an account by trying to login with another phone number and intercepting the verification SMS text message that, under specific conditions, remained in the outbox of the Symbian phone after the WhatsApp client would attempt to send it to itself. On Android, the verification message could be obtained through reading the "radio" with a tool named "logcat". The researcher would then copy and send the intercepted verification message to the real number of the phone, using an SMS gateway to spoof the "sender" phone number to the number the researcher tried to maliciously login with. This method worked, and WhatsApp issued a patch within one day after publication of the articles, to both the Android and Symbian clients. WhatsApp did have a security mechanism, by design, which would disable the account on the phone of the original owner of the phone number, when they had a WhatsApp account.[100][101][102]

text: In May 2011, another security hole was reported which left communication through WhatsApp susceptible to packet analysis. WhatsApp communications were not encrypted, and data was sent and received in plaintext, meaning messages could easily be read if packet traces were available.[103]

text: In May 2012 security researchers noticed that new updates of WhatsApp no longer sent messages as plaintext,[104][105][106] but the cryptographic method implemented was subsequently described as "broken".[107][108] In August 2012 the WhatsApp support staff said that messages were encrypted in the "latest version" of the WhatsApp software for iOS and Android (but not BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Symbian), without specifying the cryptographic method.[109]

text: On January 6, 2012, an unknown hacker published a website that made it possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp user, as long as the phone number was known. To make it work, it only required a restart of the app. According to the hacker, it was only one of many security problems in WhatsApp. On January 9, WhatsApp reported that it had resolved the problem, although the only measure actually taken was to block the website's IP address. As a reaction, a Windows tool was made available for download providing the same functionality. This problem has since been resolved in the form of an IP address check on currently logged-in sessions.[110][111]

text: German Tech site The H demonstrated how to use WhatsAPI to hijack any WhatsApp account on September 14, 2012.[112] Shortly after, a legal threat to WhatsAPI's developers was alleged, characterized by The H as "an apparent reaction" to security reports, and WhatsAPI's source code was taken down for some days.[113] The WhatsAPI team has since returned to active development.[114]

text: On March 31, 2013 the Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) issued a statement regarding possible measures against WhatsApp, among other applications, unless the service providers took serious steps to comply with monitoring and privacy regulations.[115][needs update]

text: In February 2014, the public authority for data privacy of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein advised against using WhatsApp, as the service lacked privacy protection such as end-to-end client side encryption technology.[116] WhatsApp started implementing end-to-end encryption in late 2014 and finished in April 2016.[17]

text: A major privacy and security problem has been the subject of a joint Canadian-Dutch government investigation. The primary concern was that WhatsApp required users to upload their mobile phone's entire address book to WhatsApp servers so that WhatsApp could discover who, among the users' contacts, was available via WhatsApp. While this was a fast and convenient way to quickly find and connect the user with contacts who were also using WhatsApp, it meant that their address book was then mirrored on the WhatsApp servers, including contact information for contacts who were not using WhatsApp. This information, which consisted solely of phone numbers without any additional information such as the name of the contact, was stored in hashed, though not salted, form.[117][118][119][120] Late 2015, the Dutch government released a press-statement claiming that WhatsApp had changed its hashing method, making it much harder to reverse, and thus now fully complies with all rules and regulations.[121]

text: A user does not need to send a friend request to send messages to another user, due to the contact discovery mentioned above.[citation needed]

text: In November 2014, WhatsApp introduced a feature named Read Receipts which alerts senders when their messages are read by recipients. Within a week, WhatsApp introduced an update allowing users to disable this feature so that message recipients do not send acknowledgements.[122] On December 1, 2014, Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both 17 years old, demonstrated the WhatsApp Message Handler Vulnerability, which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message of 2kb in size. To escape the problem, the user who receives the specially crafted message has to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh chat, because opening the message keeps on crashing WhatsApp unless the chat is deleted completely.[123] In early 2015, after WhatsApp launched a web client that can be used from the browser, Bhuyan also found that it had two security issues that compromised user privacy: the WhatsApp Photo Privacy Bug and the WhatsApp Web Photo Sync Bug.[124][125]

text: In February 2015, a Dutch university student named Maikel Zweerink published an app that set out to prove that anyone could track a WhatsApp user's status and also keep an eye of their changing profile pictures, privacy settings or status messages regardless of their privacy settings.[126]

text: On March 2, 2016, WhatsApp introduced its document-sharing feature, initially allowing users to share PDF files with their contacts.[127] However, WhatsApp's default state of automatically downloading attachments raised some concerns in the press about risk and security once support for document sharing expanded beyond PDF files.[128]

text: In August 2016, WhatsApp announced that it will start sharing account information with Facebook, consisting of the phone number of the account owner and aggregated analytical data. The address books and metadata of users are not shared. According to WhatsApp, this account information is shared to "track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook's systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them." This means that Facebook can target advertisements on the Facebook Platform better by making links between users based on the phone numbers, and make "friend suggestions" to its users based on WhatsApp's data. User data will not be shared with advertisers, and is only used internally on the Facebook services. WhatsApp emphasizes the content of user messages is still kept private thanks to its end-to-end encryption, which means WhatsApp cannot read the content of chats.[129][130] However, users are given the choice to opt out of sharing this data with Facebook for advertisement purposes.[131] In October 2016, Article 29 Working Party stated that it has serious concerns regarding the manner in which the information relating to the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy was provided to users and consequently about the validity of the users’ consent.[132]

text: From April 5, 2016, end-to-end encryption for all users' communications, including file transfers and voice calls, is supported for users of the latest client, encryption being enabled by default. It uses Curve25519 for key exchange, HKDF for generation of session keys (AES-256 in CBC mode for encryption and HMAC-SHA256 for integrity verification) and SHA512 for generating the two 30 digit fingerprints of both users' identity keys so they can verify each other as needed. Even the company would be unable to decrypt users' communications. Amnesty International and security professionals praised the move; the US Federal Bureau of Investigation criticised it as threatening the work of law enforcement.[133] Telegram, another messaging service, is reported by the BBC to be used by "Islamic State" extremists.[133]

text: WhatsApp is not the only messaging service that provides end-to-end encryption; among others, Threema, Wickr, Signal, Silent Phone, and Line also provide such encryption by default. iMessage and Viber provide it under special circumstances.[134][135] Telegram provides end-to-end encryption as an opt-in feature, but does not support end-to-end encrypted group messaging.[17]

text: As of April 5, 2016[update], WhatsApp has a score of 6 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Secure Messaging Scorecard". It has received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having communications encrypted with keys the provider doesn't have access to, allowing users to verify contacts' identities, having past messages secure if the encryption keys are stolen, having completed a recent independent security audit, and having the security designs properly documented. It is missing a point because the code is not open to independent review.[136]

text: On January 13, 2017, The Guardian reported that security researcher Tobias Boelter had found that WhatsApp's policy of forcing re-encryption of initially undelivered messages, without informing the recipient, constituted a serious loophole whereby WhatsApp could disclose, or be compelled to disclose, the content of these messages.[137] WhatsApp[138] and Open Whisper Systems[139] officials disagreed with this assessment. A follow-up article by Boelter himself explains in greater detail what he considers to be the specific vulnerability.[140]

text: Business model

text: In response to the Facebook acquisition in 2014, Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias questioned whether the company's business model of charging users $1 a year was viable in the United States in the long term. It had prospered by exploiting a "loophole" in mobile phone carriers' pricing. "Mobile phone operators aren't really selling consumers some voice service, some data service, and some SMS service", he explained. "They are selling access to the network. The different pricing schemes they come up with are just different ways of trying to maximize the value they extract from consumers."[141] As part of that, carriers sold SMS separately. That made it easy for WhatsApp to find a way to replicate SMS using data, and then sell that to mobile customers for $1 a year. "But if WhatsApp gets big enough, then carrier strategy is going to change", he predicted. "You stop selling separate SMS plans and just have a take-it-or-leave-it overall package. And then suddenly WhatsApp isn't doing anything."[141] The situation may have been different in countries other than the United States.

text: Terrorism

text: In December 2015, it was reported that Islamic State terrorists had been using WhatsApp to plot the November 2015 Paris attacks.[142] ISIL also uses WhatsApp to traffic sex slaves.[143]

text: In March 2017, U.K. Secretary of State Amber Rudd said encryption capabilities of messaging tools like WhatsApp are unacceptable, as news reported that Khalid Masood used the application several minutes before perpetrating the 2017 Westminster attack. Rudd publicly called for police and intelligence agencies to be given access to WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging services to prevent future terror attacks.[144]

text: In April 2017, the perpetrator of the Stockholm attack reportedly used WhatsApp to exchange messages with an ISIS supporter shortly before and after the 2017 Stockholm attack. The messages involved discussing how to make an explosive device and a confession of the perpetration the attack.[145]

text: Scams

text: In May 2016, some WhatsApp users were reported to have been tricked into downloading a third-party application called WhatsApp Gold.[146] The application was part of a scam that infected the users' phones with malware.[146] Another application called "GB Whatsapp" is also considered as a related scam.[citation needed] A message that promises to allow access to their WhatsApp friends' conversations, or their contact lists, has become the most popular hit against anyone who uses the application in Brazil. Since December, 2016, more than 1.5 million people have clicked and lost money[147]

text: Bans

text: China

text: In September 2017, after a series of brief disruptions, security researchers reported to The New York Times that WhatsApp service had been completely blocked in China.[148][149][150]

text: Turkey

text: Turkey temporarily banned WhatsApp in 2016, following the detention of eleven Free Democratic Party (HDP) members of parliament.[151]

text: Brazil

text: On December 17, 2015, mobile providers in Brazil were ordered to block WhatsApp for 48 hours. The ban was ordered for the service's failure to cooperate with criminal court orders in July and August 2015. The following morning, however, a judge from the appeals court ordered that the ban be lifted for being an unreasonable response, recommending that the company be fined instead. Following the ban, but prior to its reversal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded by stating that he was "stunned that our efforts to protect people's data would result in such an extreme decision by a single judge to punish every person in Brazil who uses WhatsApp. We hope the Brazilian courts quickly reverse course." The competing service Telegram reported that 1.5 million Brazilians had downloaded its app while the WhatsApp ban was in place.[152][153]

text: On March 1, 2016, Diego Dzodan, Facebook's vice-president for Latin America was arrested in Brazil for not cooperating with an investigation in which WhatsApp conversations were requested.[154] On March 2, 2016, at dawn the next day, Dzodan was released because the Court of Appeal held that the arrest was disproportionate and unreasonable.[155]

text: On May 2, 2016, mobile providers in Brazil were ordered to block WhatsApp for 72 hours for the service's second failure to cooperate with criminal court orders.[156][157] Once again, the block was lifted following an appeal, after nearly 24 hours.[158]

text: User statistics

text: In April 2014, WhatsApp crossed half-a-billion user mark.[159]

text: In May 2014, WhatsApp crossed 50 million monthly active users in India, which is also its largest country by the number of monthly active users.[160]

text: In October 2014, WhatsApp crossed 70 million monthly active users in India, which is 10% of its total user base (700 MM).[161]

text: In February 2017, WhatsApp crossed 200 million monthly active users in India.[162]

text: As of February 2017, WhatsApp has over 1.2 billion users globally.[163]

text: Competition

text: WhatsApp competes with a number of Asian-based messaging services (that as of 2014, were services like WeChat (468 million active users), Viber (209 million active users[164]) and LINE (170 million active users[165])), WhatsApp handled ten billion messages per day in August 2012,[166] growing from two billion in April 2012,[167] and one billion the previous October.[168] On June 13, 2013, WhatsApp announced that they had reached their new daily record by processing 27 billion messages.[169] According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."[170]