Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. He believed in progress and reason, and was a philosophe, as the 18th century termed it. He was a passionate anti-clerical and distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. Voltaire believed that the best form of government was a constitutional monarchy governed by an “enlightened despot.” The king should have limited power and should be advised by an oligarchy of philosophers, an intellectual aristocracy which would replace the rigid French aristocracy based solely on lineage. He fought for free will and believed that it was enabled through ones freedom of liberty, hedonism, empirical science, and skepticism.