Voltaire wrote three works of history. The first concerned a single individual, Charles XII (1728), the second an entire century, The Century of Louis XIV (1751), and the third–his most important work–was the 1756 Essay on Customs (Essai sur le moeurs et l’esprit des nations), much more ambitious than the other books, aiming, as he put it, to explain the causes for ‘the extinction, revival, and progress of the human mind’.
