He wrote under more than 170 pen names, was thrown into the Bastille for a joke, saw his books burned by the state, and was denied a Christian burial, only to be enshrined in the Pantheon before a crowd of a million people. This deep dive pieces together the life of Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, from his rebellious youth in absolutist France to his 11 months in a dungeon, the beating ordered by the Chevalier de Rohan, and the exile in England that rewired his worldview.

We follow the lottery scheme that made him independently wealthy, his 16-year intellectual partnership with Emilie du Chatelet at Cirey, the disastrous stay with Frederick the Great, and the strategic estate at Ferney on the French-Swiss border where he wrote Candide. We also examine his campaign for Jean Calas, his rallying cry to crush the infamous thing ...