Francois Marie Arouet / Voltaire
(1694 - 1778)

A view of the bust on the front of Secular Hall.

The satires of Francois Marie Arouet who wrote under the pen-name of 'Voltaire' got him jailed and exiled from France to England where he was in 1727 when Isaac Newton died. He was very impressed that a country would revere a mere Mathematician so highly as to bury him with great ceremony in the national mausoleum, Westminster Abbey. He helped to popularise Newton's ideas, and was a tireless campaigner for justice.

Some external links
Lucid Cafe on Voltaire
Kirjasto on Voltaire
Clarence Darrow on Voltaire
A Treatise on Toleration by Voltaire (1763), extracts