Voltaire International Celebrity of the Enlightenment

"Voltaire was one of the most prominent public figures of 18th-century Europe. But how can we measure the dissemination of his texts and his influence on contemporary debates? VoICE uses Digital Humanities tools to trace intertextual reuses of Voltaire’s writings across a multilingual Western European corpus (French, English, Italian, Spanish).To date, no large-scale formal study has examined the direct and indirect reuse of an Enlightenment author’s works across such extensive corpora. VoICE will help define a first “trans-European” corpus of 18th-century texts and provide a reusable framework for future research on other authors and traditions.The project evaluates Voltaire’s presence in Enlightenment texts and how these reuses enhanced his reputation and contributed to a shared intellectual horizon. It is structured around three axes:– ""Voltaire in French"", identifying direct citations;– ""Voltaire in Translation"", analyzing reuse in translated form;– ""Voltaire’s Concepts"", detecting restatements of his ideas via semantic similarity.Each axis will also explore how women writers engaged with Voltaire’s work, incorporating it into their intellectual production and using it to assert cultural authority in a male-dominated world.For the first two axes, sequence alignment software will detect textual parallels; for the third, LLMs will identify conceptual proximity between excerpts.At the crossroads of literary studies, digital humanities, and cultural history, VoICE sheds new light on the diffusion of Voltaire’s ideas—and more broadly, those of the ""philosophes""—across Enlightenment Europe. It also investigates early mechanisms of literary celebrity, with citations of Voltaire helping to shape a transnational media space."