François-Marie Arouet takes the pen name Voltaire and becomes the sharpest satirist of the French Enlightenment, and this profile traces the life behind that reputation: a writer imprisoned in the Bastille and later exiled to England, who returns home to produce plays, novels, essays, and scientific works across nearly every literary form he can find. He writes more than 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets, using satire to go after the Catholic Church, French censorship laws, and the everyday cruelty of intolerance he sees baked into the institutions of his time. The film follows his advocacy for freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and the separation of church and state, arguing that these positions cost him real personal risk rather than earning him easy admiration in his own lifetime. It closes by tracing his ideas forward into the French and American revolutions, treating Voltaire less as a literary curiosity than as a direct source of the political language those upheavals used.