WorkVoltaire

Philosophical Letters

Letters home from England, praising Quakers, merchants and smallpox inoculation, that Paris had burned by the public executioner.

by Voltaire311 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Lettres philosophiques
First published: 1734(aged 40)
Original language: French

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Overview

In 1726 servants of the chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman Voltaire had quarrelled with, beat him on their master's orders; when he sought satisfaction, he was locked in the Bastille, and he won his release by asking to go to England instead. He stayed about two and a half years, learned the language well enough to publish two essays in English in 1727, and came home with a picture of a country that had settled questions France still fought over. The letters argue that a nation grows free, rich and reasonable when it lets people worship as they choose, honours trade and follows evidence rather than authority. They open among the Quakers, a sect without priests, described with amused respect. At the Royal Exchange, where London's merchants met, one letter notes that Jew, Muslim and Christian deal with one another as if they shared a faith; a country with a single religion, it adds, would drift toward despotism, one with two would have civil war, and one with many lives in peace. Other letters praise a Parliament that had curbed its kings, merchants honoured in London though a French marquis would despise them, the English habit of inoculating children against smallpox, and Locke, who argued that every idea comes from experience, alongside Bacon and Newton. The book came out first in London in 1733 as Letters Concerning the English Nation, and in French in 1734. On 10 June 1734 the Parlement of Paris, the kingdom's highest court, condemned it as scandalous and an offence against religion, morals and authority, and had it torn up and burned by the executioner at the foot of the palace steps. Some twenty thousand copies sold in France over the next five years. A royal order for his arrest had already sent Voltaire from Paris to Cirey, the château of his companion Émilie du Châtelet, which became his base.

Key concepts

What makes the Quakers a model in the Letters?

They show religion stripped to its core and still orderly: no priests, no baptism, no titles, and a moral seriousness no church could fault. Described with amused respect, they let the letters raise a question France avoided, whether faith can do without clergy and ceremony, and in Pennsylvania they show a colony founded on toleration and at peace with its neighbours.

What is the limited monarchy the Letters admire in England?

A government in which, after a long series of struggles, the English prescribed limits to their kings by resisting them, so that the prince is all-powerful to do good and restrained from doing evil, the nobles are great without insolence, and the people share in government without confusion. Rome's civil wars, the letter adds, ended in slavery; England's ended in liberty.

Why do the Letters rank the merchant above the courtier?

Because the merchant enriches his country while the courtier plays the slave in a minister's antechamber. Trade made England rich and strong at sea: its merchants lent Prince Eugene five millions in half an hour to relieve Turin, and a peer's younger son may keep a counting-house without shame. In France, where every newcomer plays the marquis, the merchant is despised until he blushes at his own useful trade.

What do the Letters mean by taste, and why does Shakespeare lack it?

Taste is the judgment that knows what belongs in a work and what spoils it, trained on the rules the French stage took from the ancients. Shakespeare has strength, nature and the sublime, but mixes gravediggers' jokes into tragedy and farce into grandeur. The letters' point is that genius without taste can still produce passages no correct author could, which is why they translate him.

What did Locke claim about thinking matter, and why did it alarm people?

That we may never be able to determine whether a purely material being can think, since nothing shows that God cannot give matter the power of thought. Divines heard in this a claim that the soul is material and mortal. The letter replies that the question is purely philosophical, independent of faith and revelation, and that the alarm shows theologians condemning a proposition before examining it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What a Free Country Looks Like

Why had England settled questions that France still fought over? The letters answer that toleration, trade, a limited monarchy and a respect for evidence belong together, and that each one props up the others.

The Quakers open the book, a sect without priests or baptism whose founder kept his hat on before a magistrate, described with amused respect. The Royal Exchange supplies the model: Jew, Muslim and Christian deal as if they shared a faith and call only the bankrupt an infidel. One religion would bring despotism, two would bring civil war; a multitude lives in peace. The same logic runs through a Parliament that limited its kings by resisting them, merchants whom lords do not despise, inoculation adopted while the rest of Europe called it madness, and Locke, who studied the soul step by step instead of inventing it.

religion
religious toleration
religion and politics
political power
political authority
commerce
inoculation
evidence
reason
science
morality

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Genius Against the Rules

Can a writer have genius without taste? The letters on English poetry and drama put the question to Shakespeare, whose power they admire and whose disregard of the rules they fear.

Shakespeare, the letter on tragedy says, had a genius strong, natural and sublime but without the smallest spark of taste or any idea of the rules, and his merit ruined the English stage, because later writers copied his faults and time consecrated them. Yet the letters insist that beauty atones for fault, and they translate Shakespeare, Rochester, Waller and Pope to show what a prose summary cannot. Comedy gets the opposite verdict, natural in style but coarse, since words are never indifferent and nothing belongs on a public stage that a modest woman would be ashamed to repeat.

literary criticism
tragedy
theater
aesthetics
aesthetic judgment
poetry
comedy
translation
language
dramatic structure
satire

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Within this work

passages held: 311
distinct concepts: 602
by passages held, corpus-wide: #239

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “literary criticism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
aesthetics	literary criticism	14
aesthetics	tragedy	11
literary criticism	satire	10
literary criticism	tragedy	8
religion	theater	5
theater	tragedy	5
aesthetics	theater	3
satire	theater	3
aesthetics	satire	2
colonialism	religion	2
literary criticism	religion	2
religion	satire	2
satire	tragedy	2
colonialism	political power	1
literary criticism	theater	1
political power	religion	1
political power	theater	1
religion	tragedy	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1734 Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques) you are here EN
1759 Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme)
The most widely read of Voltaire's philosophical tales, a short novel published in the year he bought Ferney; its quarrel with optimism began in his poem on the Lisbon earthquake three years earlier.
EN
1762 The Sermon of the Fifty (Sermon des cinquante)
Among Voltaire's anti-Christian pamphlets, the one his posthumous editors counted the first to attack the religion directly; the arguments it set down came back in many of the tracts he wrote over the following decades.
EN
1763 Treatise on Tolerance (Traité sur la tolérance)
Voltaire's contribution to his own campaign for Jean Calas, the best known of the wrongly condemned people he defended from Ferney; it appeared two years before the verdict was overturned.
EN
1764 Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif)
An alphabet that kept growing: begun as a single pocket volume, it was enlarged through the 1760s and swollen after Voltaire's death into the combined dictionary his editors assembled.
EN
1772 We Must Take Sides (Il faut prendre un parti, ou le principe d'action)
Written at seventy-seven, it turns Voltaire's arguments away from the Church he had attacked in The Sermon of the Fifty and against the atheists of d'Holbach's circle.
EN

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