WI Voltaire was Marxist

[NapoleonXIV]

WI Voltaire had been the first to preach Marxism, a sort of pastoral communism, with the peasantry subbing for the urban proletariat?

 

[Trotsky]

I'm not an expert on Voltaire or his fellow philosophers, but was there ever a realistic chance of this happening?

 

[Hendryk]

That would be out of character for the man. The furthest he went politically was endorsing constitutional monarchy. Having spent some years in England, he was presumably aware of the Levellers and other movements of the previous century, but I'm not aware of his getting any idea from it.

If you want an Enlightenment philosopher to become this radical, you might want to try with Rousseau. His works inspired many a revolutionary hothead of the following couple of centuries in OTL, usually for the worse.

Incidentally, are you familiar with François-Noël "Gracchus" Babeuf? Now there was a genuine proto-Communist.

 

[V-J]

If you want an Enlightenment philosopher to become this radical, you might want to try with Rousseau.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Rousseau's ideas regarding the Social Contract, the general will and so on were pretty close to later Socialist thinking.