The Enlightenment is what it has. A cluster of circumstances between evolutionary inertia, scientific advances, burgeoning social concerns and the coincidence of great thinkers, ended up establishing the 18th century as a leap towards a cultivation of humanity under the splendor of intelligence and reason.
Y Voltaire He was one of the most recognized representatives of this humanist rebirth that he trusted in the diffusion of the cultural, in its reach and its greater echo, as great possibilities towards the construction of a better world.
It can be considered that, in view of the consequences (the most informed in many cases are the worst enemies of humanity), he could be naive or even good-natured. But what had happened until then was even worse. So the step forward in that universal encyclopedism seems necessary in any way (at least it was necessary to try to emerge from the shadows still hanging over common consciences).
But beyond the actual historical repercussion, Voltarie was also a writer, probably the one with the greatest repercussion in his vein of fiction among the Rousseau (with whom Voltaire shares the year of death), Diderot o montesquie, all of them more focused on the arduous task of dissemination or philosophy towards the greatest birth in the world.
Yes indeed. We do not find great fantasies in his novels or stories, but rather profuse ideological proposals served through characters with transcendental pretenses, with the existentialist mark that makes him move at the whim of an author who confronts him with the grossest consequences of the mere human "being." But the grace is to aim at all this with a point of adventure, which Dante comedy at times.
And that is precisely why it is interesting to embark on the fiction of Voltaire. His thinking becomes kinder between the action and under that idea he lavished on many stories ...
Top 3 recommended books by Voltaire
Candid or optimism
Without a doubt this is the work that, to a greater extent, represents an absolutely literary incursion by the author. Adventures and misadventures, humor that occasionally splashes between a pessimism about the human legacy until the time of Voltaire.
In its extensive review favored by the evolution of the cosmos of characters, we go through great European events of the moment. Candido personifies the will, of trust in the human.
The harsh reality looms over him, like a test of faith in the face of which his despair is always clothed again with insistence and perseverance. Among great tragic aspects of our civilization, Candide ends up being that necessary light from which he can re-ignite a world plunged into the darkness of his sarcastic creation.
Zapata's questions
A philosophical exposition that comes from the voice of a character who expresses himself in a soliloquy ends up being a narrative intention. Usually the doubts of a character come disguised as verses.
Even more so for the idea of ​​a booklet as light as this one. But of course, in the case of Voltaire, with one of the most extensive works of the Enlightenment, the doubts that Zapata presents in a concise way, the great lies of a religion that, in the face of the most basic approaches, ends up ceasing to stand.
Treatise on tolerance
And before the brief voice that rises from a Zapata who questions without finding answers, we find this now more solid work that seems to have launched a hook from that Zapata full of uncertainties. Because here things are clear.
Zapata now becomes Jean Calas, the Protestant. Perhaps it was another man full of questions and whose only answer was his summary execution. But from its iconic representation, Voltaire ended up composing this treatise that cries out against a faith that already at that time was beginning to be seen as one of the first sources of all the evils of humanity.
