Voltaire’s History of Louis XIV’s Reign

Voltaire published his Siècle de Louis XIV in 1751, but he had been working on it since the late 1720s, and parts appeared in dribs and drabs in different places before that date. He conceived it not just as a history of France, but of Europe and even of the world. Its aim was to show the achievements of modernity at a time when the celebrated quarrel between the “Ancients” and the “Moderns” was coming to a head. He wanted to describe the expansion of commerce, with an emphasis on what he saw as the necessity for luxury, along with the need for religious toleration and for the weakening of superstition. Among the traits of modernity he counted the revival of classical aesthetics, scientific discoveries, the Cartesian and Newtonian revolutions. These were themes which he had already discussed in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), but he thought they could be crystallized in the form of a history of Louis’s reign.