Voltaire: Long And Short-Term Causes Of The French Revolution

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When King Louis XVI responded to the alarming financial crisis in France by convening the first Meeting of the Estates General in more than a century and a half, he sparked a series of events in 1789 that would quickly lead to one of the world’s most important eras: The French Revolution. Historians have long argued about the short-term and long-term causes of the events that would destabilize huge parts of Europe and its colonies between 1789 and 1815, but there is no denying that the roots of the Revolution lay deep in earlier social and intellectual movements of the Reformation, the Enlightenment , and the economic theories of mercantilism and property rights. By 1789, the intellectual, “enlightened,” upper classes of Europe had provided the philosophical framework for the rest of society to start questioning…show more content…
Additionally, he was an advocate for, and went to great extents to work towards beliefs in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and religious tolerance. Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher. He was famous for his works of satire in which he exposed and attacked the faults of the Catholic Church,while advocating for freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. In his book Candide, published in 1759, Voltaire employed satire to criticise and expose misuse of the governmental power to burn heretics as they were blamed for mishaps. This book exposes the issue of political policies being based off flawed and ignorant views and principles of the church. “After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-fourths of the city of Lisbon, the sages (wise men) of that country could think of no means more effectual to preserve the kingdom from utter ruin than… the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible preventive of
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