Crime and Punishment: Voltaire (1694–1778)

Abstract

As one advances through the eighteenth century, the impact of works written during the century itself becomes of increasing importance. In Italy as in France reformers were appearing; one group in Milan, called L’Accademia dei Pugni and heavily influenced by the writings of the French philosophes, came together in the early 1760s. Amongst them was the young aristocrat Cesare Beccaria, who credited Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes with being the decisive factor in his ‘conversion to philosophy’, which had wiped out, he said, the unfortunate effects of the ‘fanatical’ Jesuit education he had received.¹ Beccaria belongs to the last of the three generations which Peter Gay discerns in the Enlightenment,² drawing heavily upon the first (in Montesquieu) and second (Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvétius and d’Alembert); but such is the chronological overlap that he himself will influence, in Voltaire, one who had helped, like Montesquieu, to set the stage for the Enlightenment and then survived to participate actively in its fullest flowering.