Voltaire's Europe between religious tolerance and the rule of law

The aim of the paper is to show that the concept of religious tolerance, on which Voltaire reflected from the 1730s until his death, undergoes a radical conceptual turn thanks to the French philosophe as compared to the previous debate (suffice to think of the notion of  tolerance theorized by Bodin, or the ideas set forth by Locke and the English Deists) and becomes a theoretical junction for an original reflection on European society as well as on reform policies aimed at overcoming the political structure of the ancien régime, the true cause, in his eye, of obscurantism, intolerance, fanaticism and political-institutional inefficiency.

The second part of the paper will show that the reflection on tolerance is instrumental, for Voltaire, in developing a new idea of Europe, one built on three cornerstones - the structure of politics (the State based on the guarantee of the law), the rejection of fanaticism and of religious persecution in the name of tolerance (an idea that paves the way to the proclamation of the right to religious freedom that will be central to the 1789 Declaration of Rights), the cultural and civil progress of society - which guarantee European freedom and turn Europe into a different space, a space of civilization and for this, according to the ideology of French Enlightenment, superior to the rest of the world still at the beginning of the path towards civilization.

In such way, this paper will try to show that Voltaire’s idea of Europe is productive of universalistic political concepts (tolerance, equality, freedom, legal certainty) that characterize the forms of European rule of law on the one hand but, on the other, of the imperialist and expansionist foreign policies of nineteenth-century European states.