… Image Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 1684 Image Jean Huber, 'Un dîner de philosophes', Voltaire Fondation, 1772. Abstract The Republic of Letters was an abstract intellectual community in the seventeenth and … communicating with one another through digital social networks, early modern individuals such as Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire , David Hume , Cesare Beccaria, and Madame du Deffand maintained active communication by writing letters to … Leibniz’s surviving correspondence numbers 15,000 letters (413). Similarly, a corpus of 21,000 letters constitutes Voltaire’s correspondence, of which 15,000 were written by Voltaire – to 1800 correspondents over the course of over …