Voltaire

A French writer and philosopher, born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694 and dead there in 1778. He wrote tragedies for the Paris stage, the satirical tale Candide (1759), and the Lettres philosophiques (1734), and he used his fame to attack the French legal system — most famously in the case of Jean Calas, a Protestant executed in 1762 whose conviction Voltaire spent two years overturning. He was imprisoned twice in the Bastille and spent most of his adult life outside Paris, much of it at Ferney on the Swiss border.

Twice, and both times for offending someone powerful rather than for breaking a law. In 1717 he was jailed for verses written against the Regent, the nobleman who governed France while Louis XV was a child. In 1726 an aristocrat he had quarrelled with had him interned again, and the episode ended his life in France for two years: he was in London by the autumn. The Bastille was a royal fortress in eastern Paris where a crown order could hold a prisoner without charge or trial — which is what made it, later, the symbol the Revolution tore down.

He chose the name in 1718, the year his tragedy Œdipe made him famous. The Voltaire Foundation at Oxford explains it as an anagram of 'Arouet l(e) j(eune)' — Arouet the younger — with the aristocratic particle 'de' added. He was born plain François-Marie Arouet, the son of a notary, and the new name was part of the invention of a public figure.

Yes. He died in Paris on 30 May 1778 and was buried at the abbey of Scellières, in the Aube. On 30 May 1791, the anniversary of his death, the revolutionary Assembly voted to move him to the Panthéon in Paris — the former church of Sainte-Geneviève, which had been turned that year into a burial place for illustrious men. His remains were carried through the city on 11 July 1791. Jean-Jacques Rousseau joined him there in 1794.

Le Procope, on the Left Bank, dates itself to 1686, calls itself the oldest café in Paris, and lists Voltaire first among the writers it says gathered there — the tale of his marble table and his enormous coffee habit is part of the house legend. It is the café's own account of itself rather than a documented chapter of his life, and the standard biographical accounts of Voltaire do not rest on it. The café is still open, and still tells the story.

He arrived in February 1778, aged eighty-three, after almost thirty years away, officially to oversee the staging of his tragedy Irène at the Comédie-Française. The city turned the visit into a coronation: at a performance of the play, his bust was brought on stage and crowned with a laurel wreath while he watched. He died in Paris on 30 May, about ten weeks later.

Jean Calas was a Huguenot — a French Protestant — who was tortured and executed on the wheel in 1762. Voltaire, then living at Ferney, took up the case, and from 1762 to 1764 ran a campaign of pamphlets, letters and public pressure that succeeded in clearing Calas's name. It is the episode that turned a celebrated author into something new: a writer using his fame to reverse a court.

Yes — not in Paris, but at Ferney, near the Swiss border outside Geneva, where he lived from 1759 and rebuilt the village around him. The château is a French national monument, open to visitors and run by the Centre des monuments nationaux, the state body responsible for historic monuments. In Paris, what survives of him is the tomb in the Panthéon and the quai Voltaire, the riverside street named after him where his funeral procession halted in 1791.