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A Review of Voltaire's Essays
Voltaire uses england as a foil to criticise the despotism and unenlightened government of france. This marks a great change from earlier criticism s of the old regime, and a dramatic change. It is the abandonment of an appeal to an idealized, mediaeval, feutile past that dominated criticisms of the monarchy at the end of the seventeenth century. And instead of reforming, rediscovering the virtues of the political past, it is an appeal to what might be brought into being.