Voltaire

Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet, was twice in the Bastille and once beaten by a nobleman’s servants before he went to England, came back with Locke and Newton, and made himself the most famous writer in Europe: poet, playwright, historian, pamphleteer and the enemy of what he called the infamous thing, religious persecution. Letters on the English introduced empiricism to France; Candide answered Leibniz with a garden; the Philosophical Dictionary attacked fanaticism in alphabetical order. He spent his last twenty years at Ferney, near the Swiss border, running a village, defending the persecuted and writing forty letters a day.