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Voltaire in His Letters
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General SummaryThe published correspondence of Voltaire extends in the French edition to eighteen large volumes. It covers almost all his eventful career, including his residence in England (1726–1729), his visit to Frederick the Great at Berlin (1750–1753), and the period from 1755 to his death in 1778, when he resided near Geneva, leading a life of inexhaustible literary activity and courted by most of the celebrities of Europe. Voltaire knew either personally or by correspondence most of the social reformers of his day; he took part in many famous controversies, both political and religious; and he devoted much energy to efforts in behalf of the persecuted and oppressed classes under the Old Régime. His Letters reflect his wide experience and varied interests. They are a contribution to history, as well as to literature.
Historical SummaryVoltaire in the following letter (1733) protests against the severity of the French censorship of the press. At this time and for many years thereafter every French author who dared to express radical opinions about either Church or State expiated them in the Bastille, while his printer and publisher were sent to the galleys.
CHAPTER XIX
A "Philosophe"1
91. Liberty of the Press2
As you have it in your power, sir, to do some service to letters,
I implore you not to clip the wings of our writers so closely, nor
to turn into barn-door fowls those who, allowed a start, might
become eagles; reasonable liberty permits the mind to soar — slavery
makes it creep.
Had there been a literary censorship in Rome, we should have
had to-day neither Horace, Juvenal, nor the philosophical works
of Cicero. If Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Locke had not been
free, England would have had neither poets nor philosophers;
there is something positively Turkish in proscribing printing;
and hampering it is proscription. Be content with severely
repressing defamatory libels, for they are crimes. . . .
You say that the magistrates who regulate the literary custom-house
complain that there are too many books. That is
just the same thing as if the provost of merchants complained
there were too many provisions in Paris. People buy what they
choose. A great library is like the city of Paris, in which there
are about eight hundred thousand persons: you do not live
with the whole crowd: you choose a certain society, and change
it. So with books; you choose a few friends out of the many.
There will be seven or eight thousand controversial books, and
fifteen or sixteen thousand novels, which you will not read:
a heap of pamphlets, which you will throw into the fire after you
have read them. The man of taste will only read what is good;
but the statesman will permit both bad and good. . . .
1 S. G. Tallentyre, New York and London, 1919.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
2 Tallentyre, , pp. 31–33.
Contents:
Chicago: Tallentyre, ed., "Liberty of the Press," Voltaire in His Letters in Readings in Modern European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1926), 198. Original Sources, accessed May 19, 2024, http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=AS9J4PJXK2SI2NX.
MLA: . "Liberty of the Press." Voltaire in His Letters, edited by Tallentyre, in Readings in Modern European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, D.C. Heath, 1926, page 198. Original Sources. 19 May. 2024. http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=AS9J4PJXK2SI2NX.
Harvard: (ed.), 'Liberty of the Press' in Voltaire in His Letters. cited in 1926, Readings in Modern European History, ed. , D.C. Heath, Boston, pp.198. Original Sources, retrieved 19 May 2024, from http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=AS9J4PJXK2SI2NX.
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