The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

"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.