Tag Archives: Voltaire

Tolerance: Beacon of the Enlightenment

posted by Caroline Warman

You might have seen that in the vigils and marches that followed the Charlie Hebdo assassinations on 7 January 2015, posters of Voltaire like this one appeared everywhere, along with some of his polemical slogans about the importance of religious tolerance.

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Dozens of university lecturers in France who teach Voltaire and other eighteenth-century writers, and who were all as distressed by the events and by the increasingly polarised politics that followed as anyone else, decided to put together an anthology of texts from the Enlightenment. This anthology would make available to everyone what writers of the time said about liberty, equality, and fraternity, about the importance of religious tolerance, about the rights of women, about the abomination of slavery, about the exploitation created by a system of global capitalism, and so on. It would contain the original text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, enshrined in the French Constitution since 1789, and it would also contain the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen drawn up by Olympe de Gouges, which was roundly rejected in an atmosphere of general hilarity. Some of the extracts would be witty, some would be serious or even tragic, some might even seem objectionable to us now, but all would be arguing their point with great passion, and the collection as a whole would shine a light onto a world and a century which have many more connections with us than we would ever have thought. This anthology, entitled Tolérance: le combat des Lumières, was published in April 2015 by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle.

 

We in the UK wanted to support and applaud this initiative, and we wanted to extend its readership. So we decided to translate it. And we thought, who better to translate this texts than our students? They are the citizens, female and male, of today and tomorrow, they are deeply engaged in our world, and they are brilliant at languages.

 

At Oxford we do a lot of translation anyway – we translate about half a page of French into English, and the other way round, every week.  We do that because it develops our language skills immensely – it challenges us to be linguistically inventive while never letting us off the hook in terms of grammatical accuracy and syntactical fluency. It is quite hard, but we love it, not least because we all do it together in college classes. You’d never believe how many different ways of translating a single sentence there are. Translation is also a particularly intense way of reading, because to translate something you really have to get inside the text. It’s incredibly stimulating, because you’re both reading and writing at the same time.

 

So, one hundred and two of us – tutors and their second-year students (who don’t have any exams) from lots of different colleges – translated the anthology this past summer term. And we published it on 7 January 2016, the first anniversary of the shootings. We launched it at the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which supported the project, and it has received some nice coverage in the press and online. On the first day it was downloaded more than 4000 times. We were amazed!

 

So here it is, free to download. Every single text has a link to the original French, sometimes in the original eighteenth-century edition. Have a look! Because if there’s one audience we really want to reach, it’s you! You are our future, and our future needs open-minded thinkers, and it needs linguists. Go for it!

TOLERANCE: BEACON OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Candide App-eal

The enlightenment philosophe, Voltaire, and his riotously entertaining, very accessible philosophical satire, Candide, are topics this blog will be getting around to discussing in the near future. In the meantime, the Voltaire Foundation, a research institute that forms part of Oxford University, have been working on an app, available for free on iTunes, and they would like to tell you a little about it…

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posted by Clare Fletcher of the Voltaire Foundation

The Candide app for iPad brings the most famous of Voltaire’s tales to life. There’s more to the work than writing on a page.

As you read the Voltaire Foundations’ edition of Candide, you can look across the screen to discover a 1758 manuscript of the work. By looking at the handwriting, you can almost hear Voltaire’s voice dictating the tale to his secretary, Wagnière. Sometimes you can even glimpse moments when Voltaire himself intervenes with the draft – adding to, crossing out, and correcting his secretary’s writing. In Chapter 1, Voltaire introduces the character Pangloss, as a teacher of “la métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie”. In the manuscript, we can see that Voltaire changed his mind, having first tried “métaphisico-theolo-cosmolo-méologie”, then altering the last word to “mattologie”. You can actually catch Voltaire in the process of inventing a new word. It is as if we can spy on Voltaire as he writes.

 

Not only can you read Candide for yourself, you can now listen to actor Denis Podalydès’ lively telling of the tale. Thanks to his reading we enjoy moments of Voltaire’s characteristic humour and irony, that can be missed when reading alone.

If you ever get lost in the story (it is a bit of a whirlwind adventure!) or want to explore aspects more deeply, with just a click you can look up characters, places, concepts, and historical facts. The section of the app called ‘Le Monde’ enables you to track the characters’ routes across the world as you read. You can zoom in on locations to discover more about life in, say, Buenos Aires and Venice in the 18th century. A much more exciting and enlightening version of Google Maps!

 

Another section of the app is ‘Le Jardin’, where you give your take on Voltaire’s work. You can create your own workbook of information and interpretations in the form of a ‘tree’ and look at those of others. This is really handy if you want to study Candide with your class as you can all contribute and share ideas in the ‘garden’. All this might sound a bit out-there, but take a look at the app and you’ll understand!

 

The app is really worth a download. Voltaire’s tale comes into its own in digitised form. With the Candide app, you can accompany Candide on his adventure across the globe at whatever speed you like.

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