Voltaire

Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Educated by Jesuits in Paris, he adopted his pen name in the 1710s and became one of Europe's most widely read authors. He wrote across many forms—tragedies, poetry, history, and the satirical tale Candide (1759)—and produced polemical and philosophical works including the Lettres philosophiques and the Dictionnaire philosophique. He was a persistent advocate of civil liberties, religious tolerance, and freedom of expression, and a critic of the institutional Church. Imprisoned and exiled at points in his life, he corresponded widely and lived his final decades near the Franco-Swiss border.