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Books Like Les Lettres persanes by Montesquieu
Works that see home through a stranger's eyes
Montesquieu's device is devastatingly simple: put a Persian nobleman in Paris and let him describe what he sees without irony. The result is that every European custom becomes visibly arbitrary, every institution becomes visibly contingent, every claim to naturalness becomes visibly conventional. These works share that same defamiliarizing outside eye.
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Buy on AmazonDe l'esprit des lois
by Montesquieu
The systematic sequel — De l'esprit des lois (1748) develops the comparative political analysis that the Lettres persanes satirizes into a full political science; the outside observer's impressions become a systematic theory of governments, laws, and environments
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Buy on AmazonLettres philosophiques
by Voltaire
The direct descendant — Voltaire's Letters on the English (1734) adapt Montesquieu's outside-observer device to the English perspective: English religious tolerance and Newtonian science seen from France defamiliarize French absolutism and Catholicism
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Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The radical continuation — Voltaire inherits the comparative perspective of the Lettres persanes and demolishes it entirely; where Montesquieu's Persians observe France with wonder and occasional horror, Candide observes the entire world with accumulated catastrophe
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Zadig
by Voltaire
The Oriental continuation — Voltaire's Zadig in Babylon uses the same Oriental observer technique as the Lettres persanes for philosophical rather than political satire; the Oriental tale form that Montesquieu and Voltaire both developed from the Arabian Nights tradition
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Buy on AmazonL'Ingénu
by Voltaire
The Huron observer — Voltaire's L'Ingénu uses the native North American as the outside observer who cannot understand French Catholic hypocrisy; the third major Enlightenment outside-observer device after Montesquieu's Persian and Voltaire's Sirian
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Lettres d'une Péruvienne
by Françoise de Graffigny
The female continuation — Graffigny's 1747 epistolary novel in which a Peruvian noblewoman captured by Spanish conquistadors observes French society is the direct feminist continuation of the Montesquieu device; the outside observer who is also outside by gender
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Buy on AmazonUbu Roi
by Alfred Jarry
The theatrical descendant — Jarry's 1896 absurdist play uses the same technique of defamiliarization through a grotesque outsider (Ubu) who reveals the absurdity of political convention; the Lettres persanes device carried into theatrical Absurdism
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Buy on AmazonThe Provincial Letters
by Blaise Pascal
The satirical predecessor — Pascal's 1656 letters use the outside observer (a naive newcomer to Paris) to expose the Jesuit casuistry that an insider would find normal; the satirical epistolary device before Montesquieu transformed it into the comparative novel
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