Letters on the English
Letters on the English arrived in print in 1733, and within a year it had been seized and burned in France. Voltaire had written twenty-four essays based on his years living in Great Britain between 1726 and 1729, and French authorities saw the book for exactly what it was: a pointed comparison between England's freedoms and France's lack of them. The questions the book planted were dangerous ones. Why did English merchants command respect while French nobles sneered at trade? Why could Quakers worship without priests while French Catholics faced rigid ritual? Why did Isaac Newton receive a state funeral while French thinkers scrambled for patronage? The answers Voltaire offered would help ignite a century of upheaval.
Voltaire opens his tour of England with the Quakers, devoting the first four letters entirely to them. He admires the plainness of their faith: no baptism, no communion, no ordained priests. He quotes one Quaker directly on the absence of communion: "Only that spiritual one of hearts." Asked about priests, the same man replied: "No, no, friend, to our great happiness." Voltaire approves of this simplicity, though he still voices worry about what organized religion can do when it turns manipulative. Letter 5 turns to the Church of England, which Voltaire treats more generously than he treats Catholicism. He notes that the English clergy conduct themselves with greater regularity than their French counterparts, but he cannot resist pointing out that they cling to many Catholic ceremonies, especially, as he puts it, their scrupulous attention to collecting tithes. The Presbyterians receive sharper treatment in Letter 6. Voltaire sketches one with a comic eye: broad-brimmed hat, long cloak over a short coat, preaching through the nose, and branding any well-paid minister a whore of Babylon. He also mocks the Sunday restrictions the Presbyterians impose on London, where no operas, plays, or concerts are permitted, and cards are confined to people of quality. Letter 7 reaches the Socinians, whose doubts about the Trinity aligned loosely with Voltaire's own deist outlook. He argues that even the presence of Newton and Locke among their number cannot convince ordinary people to think rationally; most prefer to follow the teachings of what Voltaire calls "wretched authors" such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli.
Letter 8 positions the British parliament against both ancient Rome and modern France. Voltaire criticizes England for having fought wars in the name of religion, something Rome did not do. Yet he praises England for serving liberty rather than tyranny, which he takes to be Rome's defining failure. Against French critics who condemned England for the execution of Charles I, Voltaire points to the British judicial process, contrasting it with the outright murders of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII and Henry III of France, and the multiple assassination attempts against Henry IV of France. The implication is plain: England may have killed a king, but it did so through law, not through darkness. Letter 9 moves from constitutional drama to everyday governance, covering the history of the Magna Carta, the equal dispensing of justice, and the way taxes are levied. For Voltaire these were not dry administrative details; they were the institutional skeleton that kept English liberty alive.
Letter 10 advances one of the book's central arguments: English trade is not merely an economic fact but a source of political liberty. From 1707 onward, Voltaire notes, England had become Britain, and British commerce had given the nation its naval power and its riches. He sees the relationship as reciprocal: trade expanded because liberty existed, and liberty expanded because trade flourished. Voltaire uses the letter to mock German and French nobles who look down on commerce. For him, a businessman who, as he writes, "contributes to the felicity of the world" matters more than a nobleman who does nothing. The contrast with France, where aristocrats prized idleness as a mark of rank, could hardly be more pointed. Letter 11 pursues a related theme of practical reason. Voltaire argues for the English practice of inoculation against smallpox at a time when continental Europe largely condemned it. The probable prompt for this argument was a smallpox epidemic that struck Paris in 1723, killing 20,000 people. Voltaire presents inoculation not as a curiosity but as a proven method that French prejudice was costing French lives.
Letters 12 through 17 form a sustained argument for empirical thinking, built around several towering British figures. Francis Bacon opens this sequence in Letter 12, identified as the author of Novum Organum and the father of experimental philosophy. Letter 13 turns to John Locke and his theories on the immortality of the soul. Letter 14 takes on the comparison between Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes, a comparison that had been made publicly in a eulogy by the French philosopher Fontenelle after Newton's death in 1727. The British, Voltaire notes, resented the comparison. Voltaire himself insists that Descartes, too, was a genuine philosopher and mathematician, and that the rivalry need not be so sharp. Letters 15, 16, and 17 each take a different branch of Newton's work: universal gravitation, optics, and geometry together with his theories on the chronology of history. Voltaire spreads Newton across three letters because Newton's achievements were too broad for one. The cumulative effect is a portrait of what rational inquiry, freed from theological interference, could accomplish.
Letter 18 gives Voltaire's readers something unexpected: William Shakespeare. Voltaire presents the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet alongside his own French translation into rhyming verse, and he also cites a passage from John Dryden with a translation. Letter 19 names William Wycherley, John Vanbrugh, and William Congreve as the central figures of British comedy. Letter 20 touches briefly on the belles lettres of the nobility, singling out the Earl of Rochester and Edmund Waller. Letter 22 references the poetry of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Letter 23 delivers what may be Voltaire's most pointed cultural argument: the British honor their men of letters far better than the French do, in both money and public respect. Letter 24, the last of the original twenty-four, weighs the Royal Society of London against the Academie Francaise and finds the Academie wanting. Voltaire's running implication across these chapters is that a society reveals its values by how it treats its thinkers, and France is revealing something unflattering.
Letter 25 was not included with the original twenty-four, and its subject explains why: it is a direct philosophical confrontation with Blaise Pascal. Voltaire takes citations from Pascal's Pensees and offers his own readings of each passage. The core disagreement is about human nature. Pascal held that human beings are essentially miserable, condemned to fill the emptiness of their lives with distractions. Voltaire rejects that view entirely, holding instead the optimistic Enlightenment position that human life is not a penance to be endured. A revised edition of the book appeared in English in 1778, nearly half a century after its first publication, under the title Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais. The fact that the book kept returning to print across so many decades, in both languages, suggests that the questions Voltaire had asked about liberty, reason, and the treatment of ideas never became merely historical.
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Common questions
What are Letters on the English by Voltaire about?
Letters on the English is a series of twenty-four essays by Voltaire based on his time living in Great Britain between 1726 and 1729. The book examines English religion, politics, trade, science, and literature, consistently comparing English freedoms and institutions favorably to their French equivalents.
Why was Letters on the English banned in France?
The French edition, published in 1734, was rapidly suppressed because French authorities viewed the book as an attack on the French system of government. By praising English liberties, parliamentary governance, and commercial culture, Voltaire implicitly condemned French absolutism and clerical power.
When was Letters on the English first published?
The book was first published in English in 1733, followed by a French edition in 1734. A revised English edition appeared in 1778 under the title Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais.
How does Voltaire describe the Quakers in Letters on the English?
Voltaire devotes the first four letters to the Quakers and praises the simplicity of their faith, specifically their rejection of baptism, communion, and ordained priests. He quotes one Quaker describing the absence of priests as being "to our great happiness," though he also notes concern about the manipulative potential of organized religion generally.
What does Voltaire say about Isaac Newton in Letters on the English?
Voltaire dedicates three letters to Newton's work, covering his law of universal gravitation, his optics, and his work in geometry and historical chronology. He also addresses the comparison between Newton and Rene Descartes made in a eulogy by the French philosopher Fontenelle after Newton's death in 1727, arguing that Descartes deserved recognition as a great philosopher and mathematician as well.
How does Letters on the English compare to Democracy in America by Tocqueville?
Some scholars compare the two books because both involve an outsider explaining a nation to itself in flattering terms. Voltaire's depictions of English culture, society, and government consistently treat their subjects favorably when measured against French equivalents, much as Tocqueville would later explain American democracy to French readers.