On a recent Italian edition of Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations

Most readers at once associate Voltaire’s name with the noble figure of the paladin of tolerance, author of the Traité sur la Tolérance, and with the image of the brilliant narrator and inimitable stylist with his cutting irony, inventor of that literary genre called conte philosophique and characters who have become part of the pantheon of world literature, such as Candide and Zadig. But all too often the average reader’s knowledge is reduced to this. The rest of Voltaire’s immense production (which includes verse tragedies and comedies, epic poems, poetry of all kinds, educational treatises on science, philosophical texts, historical works, all sorts of pamphlets, and an immense correspondence) remains a heritage open to a small coterie of experts on 18th-century French literature. Voltaire’s posthumous fame has distorted his image or, at the very least, has shed light only on some aspects of his complex personality and, what is worse, his multifaceted work.