Leaving home: Geography in Voltaire's philosophical tales: 'Zadig', 'Micromegas', 'Candide', and 'l'Ingenu'

In this project, I provide a reading of four of Voltaire's philosophical tales – Zadig (1748), Micromégas (1751), Candide (1759), and l'Ingénu (1767) – through the analysis of Henri Lefebvre's "production of space" (La Production de l'Espace (1974); The Production of Space (1991)).;Drawing from Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751-1772) and some of Voltaire's philosophical essays such as the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) and the Philosophie de l'Histoire (1765), as well as his lengthy, yet relatively unknown work the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1770-1772), I show how space is "produced" in the four tales, that is, how man occupies space and for what purposes.;Voltaire's philosophical tales, and these four in particular, are fictional stories which deal with philosophical issues such as happiness, Providence, government and power structures, politics and society, and scientific inquiry. While the "voyage" has often been used as the principal analytical tool from which to examine the tales, in my project I offer a close reading of select spaces in each tale, and discuss how the characters (male and female) live in these spaces. I explore what these "lived spaces" signify both for Voltaire during the Enlightenment, and for our twentieth-century understanding of conceptions of space and place.