The Friends of Voltaire

"The Friends of Voltaire" by Evelyn Beatrice Hall is an anecdotal biography published in 1906. The book explores the lives of ten prominent 18th-century French Enlightenment figures through their connections to Voltaire. Each man receives a distinctive label—from d'Alembert the Thinker to Condorcet the Aristocrat—as Hall weaves together their intertwined stories. The work notably contains a phrase summarizing Voltaire's views on free speech that would later be widely misattributed as his own words, becoming one of history's most famous quotations.

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