Voltaire - Candide & Other Writings (7 books)

VOLTAIRE (born François-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778) 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 was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

Voltaire's "philosophical tales," the most celebrated of which is CANDIDE (1759), combine witty improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. CANDIDE -- presented here in four translations -- is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. It was an instant bestseller and has come to be regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment.

In his PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS (1734) Voltaire provides a pungent and often satirical assessment of the religion, politics, science, and arts of the England he observed during his nearly three-year exile. In some ways, the book can be compared with "Democracy in America" by Alexis De Tocqueville, in how it flatteringly explains a nation to itself from the perspective of an outsider, as Voltaire's depictions of aspects of English culture, society and government are often given favourable treatment in comparison to their French equivalents.

The Cambridge edition of Voltaire's POLITICAL WRITINGS presents a varied selection of his most interesting and controversial texts, many of which have not previously been translated into English. Their themes include the nature and legitimacy of political power, law and the social order, and the growing disorder in the French economy, and in addition they touch on specific issues such as the Seven Years' War and relations with Frederick II, and the sensational trials of Jean Calas, Sirver and the Chevalier De La Barre.


The following books are a mixture of PDF or ePUB formats as indicated:

* CANDIDE (Bantam Classics, 1981). Translated by Lowell Bair. -- ePUB

* CANDIDE (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003). Translated by Henry Morley and revised by Lauren Walsh, with an Introduction and Notes by Gita Mayer. -- ePUB

* CANDIDE (Yale University Press, 2005). Translated by Burton Raffel. -- PDF

* CANDIDE & OTHER STORIES (Oxford World's Classics, 2006). Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Pearson. -- PDF

* PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS, or, Letters Regarding the English Nation (Hackett, 2007). Translated by Prudence L. Steiner, edited with an Introduction by John Leigh. -- PDF

* POLITICAL WRITINGS (Cambridge University Press,, 1994). Edited by David Williams. -- PDF

* THE PORTABLE VOLTAIRE (Penguin, 1977). Edited with an Introduction by Ben Ray Redman. -- ePUB