The Voltaire Foundation is a research department in the University of Oxford, publishing in the area of the Eighteenth century, especially the French Enlightenment.

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Studies on Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century	Complete Works of Voltaire	Correspondence series

‘Voltaire the survivor’, by Michael Johnson, from the International Herald Tribune, 23-24 January 2010.

Everybody thinks they know all about Voltaire – they remember “Candide” from school days and they have seen his story adapted for the movies and Broadway. Today, 232 years after his death, he remains by far the best known of the 18th-century intellectual giants.

But the truth is, there is a lot more pure gold buried in his voluminous output. So much of his 15-million-word legacy is so exceptional and so little known.

Voltaire is one of those authors from the past who manages to resonate today. Perhaps his most important poem is the work dealing with the randomness of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, echoing sentiments about the recent Haiti tragedy. The two earthquakes wreaked similar degrees of death and destruction.

Read the full article here (*pdf).

Reprinted with permission from the International Herald Tribune