Voltaire

Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille at twenty-three for verses about the regent, exiled to England, and spent much of his life a few miles from a border he could cross in a hurry. He wrote plays, history, letters by the thousand, and "Candide" in three days.

In his sixties he took up the case of Jean Calas, a Protestant broken on the wheel on false evidence, and campaigned until the verdict was overturned — the first great case of a writer using his fame to force a court to reopen. He was moved to the Panthéon in 1791.