Voltaire: Treatise on Tolerance

by Voltaire , Edited and translated by Simon Harvey , Translated by Brian Masters

• ISBN13: 9780521640176
• ISBN10: 0521640172
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-12-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Voltaire is widely known as the author of a literary masterpiece, Candide, while his reputation as a thinker rests largely on his Philosophical Letters and Philosophical Dictionary. He is equally renowned as a critic of the forces of superstition and fanaticism, and a champion of freedom of thought and belief. The works presented here, in a new English translation, are among the most important and characteristic texts of the Enlightenment, and bring together all three aspects of Voltaire: the writer, the doer and the philosophe. Originating in Voltaire's campaign to exonerate Jean Calas, they are works of polemical brilliance, informed by his deism and humanism and by Enlightenment values and ideals more generally. The issues which they raise, concerning questions of tolerance and human dignity, are still highly relevant to our own times. This volume presents them together with an introduction by Simon Harvey and useful notes on further reading.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vi
Chronology	xx
Further reading	xxii
Note on the texts	xxiv
Treatise on Tolerance	1	(106)
The Story of Elisabeth Canning and the Calas Family	107	(10)
An Address to the Public concerning the Parricides imputed to the Calas and Sirven Families	117	(20)
An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre	137	(12)
The Cry of Innocent Blood	149	(8)
Index	157