Voltaire

Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694, was the son of a notary. As a young man he spent nearly a year in the Bastille for verses mocking the Regent, wrote his first tragedy there, and took the pen name Voltaire. Imprisoned again after a quarrel with a nobleman, he was forced into three years' exile in England, where he was deeply influenced by the ideas of Locke and Newton. He wrote more than two thousand works and over twenty thousand letters, lived for three years at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and in old age settled at Ferney on the French-Swiss border, where he campaigned to clear the name of the Calas family, victims of religious persecution, and was hailed as 'the conscience of Europe'. In 1778 he returned to Paris to a hero's welcome, and died soon after.