Voltaire
Discover Voltaire — the Enlightenment's sharpest wit, whose writings championed freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and reason against tyranny and superstition.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) was the most famous writer of the Enlightenment and perhaps the most influential public intellectual in European history. His prodigious output — plays, poems, histories, novels, essays, and over 20,000 surviving letters — combined devastating wit with passionate advocacy for freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and the reform of unjust institutions.
Voltaire's life embodied the Enlightenment's confrontation with established power. Imprisoned in the Bastille twice for his writings, exiled to England (where he absorbed Lockean philosophy and Newtonian science), and eventually settling at Ferney near the Swiss border (from where he could flee French jurisdiction if needed), Voltaire waged relentless intellectual warfare against what he saw as the twin enemies of human progress: religious fanaticism and political tyranny.
His most famous work, Candide (1759), is a savage satire on philosophical optimism and the brutality of the world. His Philosophical Letters introduced English ideas of tolerance and limited government to a French audience. His campaigns against specific injustices — notably the judicial murder of Jean Calas — demonstrated how public opinion, mobilized by a great writer, could challenge and sometimes overcome entrenched power. The quote most associated with him — 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' — captures his legacy even if he never said those exact words.