An open library of thought
Fight fanaticism with reason and irony.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three works: the tale Candide, the Philosophical Letters and the Treatise on Tolerance. The plays, histories, the Philosophical Dictionary and a correspondence of more than fifteen thousand letters are not indexed; this is a selection. The famous sentence about defending to the death another’s right to speak was written in 1906 by Evelyn Beatrice Hall to sum up his attitude.
011759
Published anonymously in 1759 as a translation from the German of “Doctor Ralph”, the tale responds to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the debates on providence it revived. Its target is less Leibniz’s own metaphysics than a popularized optimism in the line of Pope and Wolff; Voltaire long disowned the book.
021733–1734
Drawn from his stay in England from 1726 to 1728, the letters appeared first in English in 1733, then in French in 1734. The Parlement of Paris had the book burned and Voltaire withdrew to Cirey; the portrait of England is deliberately idealized to serve a French argument.
031763
Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant, was executed in 1762 after being accused of killing his son to prevent his conversion. Published in 1763 within Voltaire’s campaign, the treatise contributed to the rehabilitation of 1765; its tolerance stays within a deist frame and does not yet amount to equal civil rights.