Voltaire

Francois-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, satirist and historian, famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, and of slavery, and an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and separation of church and state. A versatile and prolific writer, he produced works in almost every literary form, writing more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets, and was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally despite constant risk from the French monarchy's censorship laws. His best-known work, Candide, is a novella satirizing the philosophical optimism of his time, most notably Gottfried Leibniz's belief that this is the best of all possible worlds.