Union Académique Internationale

In mid-July 1765, Voltaire produced a twenty-page pamphlet entitled Questions sur les miracles à M. le professeur Cla* par un proposant, hoping at best for a reply from the said pastor, little thinking that it would lead to the publication eleven months later, in May 1766, of a 232-page volume entitled Collection des lettres sur les miracles, composed of various short writings from the period. Voltaire's series of twenty imaginary letters might at first glance be seen as one chronological sequence, as superficial as the fickle and fleeting question they address. But the Collection is at the same time an attack on Christianity; an attack on John Turberville Needham, a new anti-philosophical adversary for Voltaire; and a political wrangle which questions the relationship between church authorities and civil government, challenged by the situation in Switzerland at the time.