François-Marie Arouet — Voltaire — was born in Paris in 1694. He chose his pen name at twenty-four after his first stay in the (for libelling the regent of France in verse). Across sixty more productive years he wrote some 50 plays, 30 historical and philosophical essays, two thousand books and pamphlets, and twenty thousand letters — making him the most prolific and the most translated French writer of the eighteenth century. Candide (1759) is the most famous philosophical satire in the language. He campaigned untiringly for the religious freedom of Protestants and Jews in Catholic France, against torture and judicial murder, and for the principle later compressed into the phrase often misattributed to him: 'I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' Exiled to England in his thirties, he absorbed the British constitutional monarchy and Newton's physics; back in France he became Frederick the Great's house guest in Berlin, then Catherine the Great's correspondent, then a quiet seigneur at Ferney on the French-Swiss border. He returned to Paris at eighty-three to a hero's welcome and died there a few months later in 1778.
All Figures
Philosopher · Satirist · Essayist of the Enlightenment
Voltaire
1,694 CE – 1,778 CE
France's most savage wit and most powerful champion of religious tolerance, civil liberty and freedom of speech — exiled, imprisoned in the Bastille twice, and read everywhere.
Lifetime
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