Voltaire: Philosophical Letters (1734)Voltaire, the pseudonym of the 18th-century French philosopher, Deist, and political thinker Francois-Marie Arouet, lived most of his life in Geneva, Switzerland, because he had been expelled from most other European countries for criticizing their governments. He was one of the foremost minds of the Enlightenment and a harsh critic of governmental abuse, tyranny, hypocrisy, and organized religion. In this 1734 selection, from his well-known Philosophical Letters, republished in English in 1778 as Letters on the English, his target is the legal privileges of the French nobility, who as a class retained many of the rights they had under the medieval system of feudalism.