Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694–1778), was the leading French writer of the Enlightenment. After eleven months in the Bastille for a satire on the Regent, he took the name Voltaire in 1718, when his Œdipe made his name. After a 1726 clash with the Rohan family, he exiled himself to England, admiring its constitutional monarchy.

His English Letters (1733), burned as the French Lettres philosophiques, sent him to Cirey with his companion Émilie du Châtelet. Frederick the Great made him a Potsdam chamberlain in 1750, but a quarrel led to his 1753 detention at Frankfurt. In 1758 he bought Ferney by the Swiss border.

There he published Candide (1759) and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), and campaigned for Jean Calas, executed in 1762 and cleared in 1765. Barred from Paris for decades, he returned in 1778 and died on 30 May. His remains reached the Panthéon in 1791.