Voltaire

Voltaire spent his life provoking the powerful and paying for it: imprisoned in the Bastille twice as a young man, exiled to England for three years after a quarrel with a nobleman, later installed at Frederick the Great's Prussian court before a bitter falling-out sent him fleeing again.

He settled at Ferney near the Swiss border, close enough to the frontier to escape arrest, and spent his final decades running a small industry of pamphlets, plays, and philosophical tales while campaigning for the wrongly condemned, most famously overturning the conviction of Jean Calas, a Protestant executed on false charges. Candide (1759) answered both the Lisbon earthquake and his own quarrel with Leibnizian optimism in one merciless comic sprint.

He returned to Paris in 1778 for a triumphant final visit and died within weeks, mobbed by admirers to the last.