Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris, the son of a lawyer, and was educated by the Jesuits. His father wanted him to study law. He wanted to write, and to be witty, and he soon found that wit could be dangerous. In 1717 some satirical verses about the Regent of France sent him to the Bastille for nearly a year. He used the time to write a tragedy, and when he came out, he took the name Voltaire.

In 1726, after a quarrel with an arrogant nobleman, he was beaten up by the nobleman’s servants, sent back to the Bastille, and then allowed to go into exile in England. He spent more than two years there and admired what he saw: freedom of the press, a degree of religious tolerance, respect for merchants and scientists. When his Letters Concerning the English Nation came out in France, praising all of it, the book was condemned and burned.

Voltaire spent the next fifteen years largely at the château of Cirey, in eastern France, with Émilie du Châtelet, a brilliant mathematician who later translated Isaac Newton into French. He worked for a time at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, which ended badly, and finally settled at Ferney, just on the French side of the Swiss border, where he could escape quickly if he had to.

He wrote constantly: plays, poems, histories, philosophy and more than twenty thousand letters. In his old age he became Europe’s great campaigner against religious persecution and judicial cruelty, fighting for years to clear the name of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant wrongly executed for his son’s death. He signed letters with the battle cry Écrasez l’infâme: crush the infamous thing, meaning intolerance and the abuse of power.

Candide (1759) is his most read work today. Its young hero is taught by his tutor, Pangloss, that this is the best of all possible worlds, and then suffers war, earthquake, shipwreck, slavery and the Inquisition. In the end Candide decides only that “we must cultivate our garden.”

One famous line usually credited to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” was written by an English biographer in 1906, summing up his views. He would probably have enjoyed the mix-up.