VOLTAIRE

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - Parisian Boy, Jesuit Mind
3. Chapter Two - Bastille Blues
4. Chapter Three - A New Name, A New Weapon
5. Chapter Four - The First Firestorm
6. Chapter Five - Newton, Locke, Bacon, and Beef
7. Chapter Six - Philosophical Brawler
8. Chapter Seven - Émilie: The Real Genius
9. Chapter Eight - Candide and the Art of F**k You
10. Chapter Nine - The Calas Affair
11. Chapter Ten - Voltaire vs. the World
12. Chapter Eleven - The House at Ferney
13. Chapter Twelve - Return to Paris, Crowned in Ink
14. Chapter Thirteen - Death, Legacy, Resurrection

Excerpt

PROLOGUE VOLTAIRE DIDN’T WRITE to make friends. He wrote to make people uncomfortable. Preferably powerful ones. Kings, priests, popes, and judges. If you had a title and a stick up your ass, you were probably on his to-do list. He didn’t invent sarcasm, but he weaponized it. He turned essays into punches, plays into grenades, and pamphlets into the 18th-century version of a Twitter fight. And he kept doing it even after they threw him in prison, kicked him out of countries, banned his books, and tried to shut him up with everything short of actual murder. Spoiler: it didn’t work. Voltaire had a theory. Not about philosophy or metaphysics or the meaning of life, but about how to win. The...