Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet was born in 1694 to an elite family well placed in the French royal bureaucracy. Though his father wanted him to find a position of power in public life, Voltaire defied him by becoming a writer. Establishing himself in literary circles, he debuted in 1718 with the publication of the tragedy Oedipe. Voltaire's writing got him into trouble many times in his life. For one long period starting in 1726, he exiled himself to England to escape from prosecution for defamation. There, he stayed at the estate of Lord Bolingbroke, in whose circle he met the writers Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and others. Voltaire's time in England introduced him to Newtonian science and other radical intellectual ideas of the time. When he returned to France, he dedicated himself to fighting “hydras and superstition,” with his philosophical and satirical writings. This earned him many enemies, especially in the government as well as in the religious establishment, which was dominated by the Jesuits. By the time of his death in 1778, France had embraced Voltaire as a national hero. The French Revolution, still to come, was the ultimate culmination of the Enlightenment thinking of which Voltaire was a part. Since then, his popularity has only grown: Candide is still the most widely taught work of French literature in the world.