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1979
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Roland Virolle, « Voltaire et les matérialistes d'après ses derniers contes », Dix-Huitième Siècle, ID : 10.3406/dhs.1979.1219
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Roland Virolle : Voltaire and toe materialists in the last "contes". In the last three years of his 'Mfe, with the rivality between theism and materialism, Voltaire persisted in opposing his God to the brute Nature of the new philosophers (Maillet, Needham, Buffon, etc...) ; but as (long as Turgot was in power, and even more after his disgrace in 1776, a united philosophical front was a political necessity, and so his contes attempted to reduce the differences between the two camps. In the Histoire de Jenni, Spinozism becomes an acceptable compromise, while in les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield it is stoicism. But Voltaire remained convinced that in his age, God was the only guarantee of happiness. Thus, while making concessions in metaphysics and ethics, he defended to the last his God who for him was not metaphysical.