Abstract
In the sixth of his Lettres philosophiques (1734), Voltaire offers an apology for the tolerance that reigns at the London Stock Exchange, where different faiths coexist peacefully : " There, the Jew, the Mohammedan and the Christian treat each other as if they were of the same religion, and only give the name of infidel to those who bankrupt ". This text has been commented on by the great philologist Erich Auerbach, from his exile in Istanbul during the Second World War, and more recently by Carlo Ginzburg, who have seen in it signs of the ambivalence of the Enlightenment. We'd like to take a closer look at Auerbach's reading, which emphasized Voltaire's lightness and superficiality, the dangers of his abstract and reductive universalism, and went so far as to draw a line between the " propaganda of the Enlightenment " and that of the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century. This idea that Enlightenment thinkers, and French philosophers in particular, developed an abstract universalist project, hostile to all cultural and religious differences, is part of a long history, stretching from counter-revolutionary thought (Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre) to Cold War liberalism (Isaiah Berlin). After indicating its limits, we return to Voltaire's text, to see how tolerance and cosmopolitanism are articulated around a diagnosis of modernity. This leads us to propose a pluralist reading of Enlightenment universalism, or rather of the " universal effects " that can be found in eighteenth-century literature .
