Le voyage de trois élèves de St Albans à Oxford

De g. à d.: Jamie, Chris, Will et Dimitri.

Le 15 janvier 2019, nous sommes partis de St Albans School pour visiter la Fondation Voltaire à Oxford afin de rencontrer le professeur Nicholas Cronk et le Dr Gillian Pink, avec l’intention d’en savoir plus sur leur travail à la Fondation. Après une heure et demie de route, nous sommes arrivés à notre destination. Le but de notre visite à la Fondation était d’améliorer notre compréhension des contes philosophiques de Voltaire Zadig et Micromégas pour notre examen de Pre-U. Nous savions que c’était une chance incroyable de pouvoir visiter la Fondation.

Conversation avec le professeur Cronk et le Dr Pink

De g. à d.: Will, Chris, Dimitri, Dr Pink, Pr Cronk.

Le Dr Pink et le professeur Cronk nous ont expliqué comment l’institut avait été établi et les buts de la Fondation. En discutant avec le professeur Cronk, nous avons aussi découvert les thèmes principaux des deux contes, ce qui nous sera bénéfique sans doute pour nos examens de Pre-U cet été. Nous avons discuté en particulier des problèmes du mal, de la différence entre la providence et la destinée et la différence entre la conclusion leibnizienne de Zadig et la critique sévère de Leibniz dans le conte de Candide. Nous avons d’abord examiné le problème du mal dans un contexte historique et philosophique et la question de l’existence d’un Dieu et des cruautés du monde.

Chris et le Dr Pink examinent une lettre de Voltaire.

Nous avons ensuite discuté pour savoir si, dans le conte de Zadig, Voltaire aborde ce problème en utilisant l’ironie, ou s’il essaie de nous donner l’occasion d’y réfléchir nous-mêmes en ne tirant pas de conclusion. C’est une œuvre de fiction dans le style d’un conte oriental. Ensuite nous avons parlé du rôle des sciences dans le conte de Micromégas. Nous avons fini la séance en regardant d’anciennes lettres de Voltaire adressées à ses amis. On peut vraiment dire que c’était une expérience unique et inoubliable pour tout le monde. Nous étions vraiment ravis de pouvoir tenir un moment d’histoire entre nos mains et de voir la vraie signature d’un tel écrivain.

Ce qui leur arrive à la ‘Voltaire Room’

Dimitri, plongé dans une édition originale.

En arrivant à la Taylor Institution, on a rencontré Nick Hearn, qui nous a montré plusieurs livres originaux de Voltaire. Par exemple, on a eu la chance de tenir un manuscrit authentique entre nos mains et Nick Hearn nous a montré une édition originale de Micromégas, imprimée en 1752.

– Chris, Dimitri et Will, St Albans School

Entretien avec Nicholas Cronk et Glenn Roe

For those who missed it first time round, here is another chance to read this interview with Glenn Roe and Nicholas Cronk, first published last January.

Glenn Roe et Nicholas Cronk.

Où en est la publication des Œuvres complètes de Voltaire par la Voltaire Foundation ?

Nicholas Cronk

La publication des Œuvres complètes de Voltaire a été initiée dans les années 1960 par Theodore Besterman, qui venait d’achever l’édition d’une gigantesque correspondance de plus de vingt mille lettres. L’édition qui faisait autorité, en quelque sorte, était encore celle de Beaumarchais et de Condorcet, imprimée à Kehl (1784-1785), car les grandes éditions qui lui ont succédé au XIXe siècle, comme celle de Louis Moland (1877-1885) reprennent son organisation. Seulement, l’édition de Kehl est un monument à la mémoire de Voltaire et pas véritablement une édition critique. L’organisation chronologique adoptée par la Voltaire Foundation, sur la proposition de William H. Barber, a permis d’éviter, par exemple, certains écueils de la classification générique, qui a du sens dans le cas des ouvrages d’histoire, des tragédies et de La Henriade, mais qui condamne les petits récits en prose, que Voltaire appelait « fusées volantes », à figurer dans des volumes de mélanges. L’édition de la Voltaire Foundation redonne leur place à ces textes, qui sont tout sauf mineurs. Elle sera achevée à l’automne 2020. Nous travaillons actuellement, par exemple, sur l’édition du Siècle de Louis XV, qui n’a jamais été éditée scientifiquement, sur les Annales de l’Empire et sur les Lettres philosophiques, qui sont plus connues.

Quel est le lien entre les Œuvres complètes et le projet Digital Voltaire ?

Nicholas Cronk

Publier les œuvres complètes de Voltaire est un travail infini et une édition numérique offre tout simplement l’avantage de pouvoir être régulièrement mise à jour, sans qu’il y ait besoin d’engager de moyens considérables. Le numérique permet également d’imaginer une édition critique d’un nouveau genre, moderne, proposant une articulation thématique, générique et chronologique inédite, enrichie d’hyperliens, de textes annexes, d’images, de musique (car les poèmes de Voltaire étaient parfois mis en musique), etc. Une telle édition doit faciliter le travail des chercheurs : Voltaire, par exemple, pratiquait volontiers l’auto-plagiat, c’est un phénomène qui n’a pas été beaucoup étudié et que les éditeurs de Kehl ont occulté, en supprimant des répétitions qu’ils trouvaient inconvenantes. Or, la redite, chez Voltaire, est une véritable esthétique, et à la fin de sa vie, il reprenait des textes de jeunesse, faisait parfois semblant d’ignorer qu’il en était lui-même l’auteur, les corrigeait, etc. Les techniques d’alignement de séquences permettent de redonner vie facilement à cet aspect de l’écriture. Le numérique doit également nous permettre de repenser des notions clefs de la pensée de Voltaire comme l’athéisme ou la tolérance, qui ont pu évoluer dans le temps, de comprendre son positionnement politique à telle ou telle période, ou les raisons de son intérêt pour la jurisprudence à la fin de sa vie. On doit pouvoir sortir de l’opposition traditionnelle un peu figée entre Voltaire et Rousseau et de la lecture monolithique proposée, par exemple, par le Dictionnaire philosophique en huit volumes de l’édition de Kehl, qui se compose de textes écrits sur quarante ou cinquante ans que Voltaire n’avait jamais pensé à regrouper.

Glenn Roe

Le label Digital Voltaire regroupe un ensemble de projets, qui ont vocation à enrichir, à terme, l’édition numérique des œuvres complètes de Voltaire. Le programme de recherche qui sera fixé courant 2019 prendra symboliquement le relais de l’édition papier. Les projets portent sur l’intertextualité, sur les autorités, sur les phénomènes de reprise, sur les principales thématiques de la pensée de Voltaire, que nous étudions en recourant à des techniques de topic modeling et de mapping. La vectorisation des mots doit nous permettre de mieux comprendre l’évolution de la pensée philosophique de Voltaire. Nous devrions parvenir à mettre au point une sorte d’ontologie ou de cartographie intellectuelle de Voltaire, qui pourra être comparée avec celle de Rousseau ou d’autres auteurs du XVIIIe siècle édités par la Voltaire Foundation.

Quelles sont les priorités de la Voltaire Foundation dans le domaine des humanités numériques ?

Nicholas Cronk

Il est certain qu’un projet numérique qui réunirait les œuvres et les correspondances de plusieurs auteurs du XVIIIe siècle, et qui ferait profiter aux chercheurs des possibilités nouvelles offertes par les outils développés au sein des humanités numériques, est loin d’être irréalisable et a de quoi séduire. Une expérience de ce genre a été réalisée sur les correspondances d’auteurs, dans les années 2000, au sein du projet Electronic Enlightenment, qui regroupe environ soixante-dix-mille lettres dans plusieurs langues. Mais je dirais que l’enjeu le plus immédiat, pour nous et pour Digital Voltaire, c’est aujourd’hui de parvenir à développer ce laboratoire de recherche en humanités numériques qui favorisera les recherches sur l’œuvre de Voltaire et sur sa réception, tout en restant l’édition critique de référence. Ce projet est un modèle de ce que nous pourrions faire à la Voltaire Foundation dans les années à venir, en collaboration avec d’autres partenaires comme la Sorbonne.

– Propos recueillis par Romain Jalabert

The above post is reblogged from Observatoire de la vie littéraire, where it first appeared on 26 January 2019.

The age of lightness

Le petit-maître et la dame en l’air, engraving, c.1780 (source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France).

France is a light-hearted nation… This classical common belief is echoed repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century and bears witness to the deep axiological, scientific and ethical upheavals which this volume explores. By analysing the importance of, and issues at stake in, these transformations, the articles gathered within tell the story of another age of Enlightenment: the story of an age of lightness.

Lightness is at the crux of how the French eighteenth century represents itself both in contrast with previous centuries and through parallels between European nations.

The notion of lightness therefore constitutes an essential paradigm of the historiography that developed immediately after the French Revolution. The intellectual heirs of the eighteenth century do not only find in this period an age of reason, progress, Enlightenment and citizens’ rights; they also feel, at times, contempt, at other times, nostalgia for the alleged lightness of its mores, the futility of its taste or the frivolity of its childish ways. Between the industrious bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century exploiting the voluptuous representations of fêtes galantes and the fascination of our own twenty-first century for the delightful frivolity of Marie-Antoinette’s era, the eighteenth century in its lightness has never lost its charm. Yet, crucially, it also challenges the progressive narrative of the history of reason and usefulness in the definition of the very values on which our community is built.

(Attr. to James Gillray), Politeness, c.1779, hand-coloured engraving (source: the Trustees of the British Museum).

It is therefore particularly revealing to analyse the concepts and values associated to the notion of lightness in the eighteenth century. Such an approach yields breakthroughs in understanding why, and to what extent, this idea of lightness has been related to the French national character in general as well as, more particularly, to its eighteenth century.

Le Siècle de la légèreté: émergences d’un paradigme du XVIII^e siècle français offers an interdisciplinary perspective that bridges multiple fields of study related to the question of lightness. The fifteen chapters deal with paintings, morals, sciences, political history, literature and technology as well as economics. Together, these articles reveal the complexity of the notion of lightness in the eighteenth century by proposing not only new and original analyses of well-known sources (Hogarth, Fontenelle or Voltaire) but also discoveries of texts and objects less often studied (such as La Morlière, le Père Castel, Octave Uzanne, carriages or perfumes).

Richard Newton, British servants with Honesty and Fidelity against French servants with Perfidy & Impudence (detail), 1795, hand-coloured etching (source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).

The critical and historiographical approach taken by this collection challenges preconceived notions and other prejudices, and unveils the national, diplomatic and at times existential concerns which contributed to the construction of the representations of eighteenth-century France. Far from proposing yet another traditional thematic approach, this volume offers the analysis of an endogenous and problematic paradigm around which multiple visions of humanity and of the world are articulated; it aims to offer a contribution to the renewal of eighteenth-century studies. Whilst it transforms how we look at a key moment in the construction of modernity, it also lays bare the sources of the fascination exerted by the French eighteenth century.

– Jean-Alexandre Perras (Institut d’études avancées de Paris) and Marine Ganofsky (University of St Andrews)

The above post is reblogged from Liverpool University Press. Marine Ganofsky and Jean-Alexandre Perras are co-editors of ‘Le Siècle de la légèreté: émergences d’un paradigme du XVIII^e siècle français’, the April volume of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.

Anarchists and terrorists at Geneva and Waterford in the 1780s

On the 1^st of July 1782, in the early hours of the morning, most of the leaders of the popular government at Geneva fled their city by boat, landing on the Neuchâtel shore of Lake Geneva, then governed by Prussia. The action shocked the abandoned inhabitants of the small republic, who had been preparing to face invading troops from France, Savoy and Bern. Republican patriotism was rife in the city, and the populace was ready for death in the name of liberty. How did this come to pass?

Geneva had long been a city divided into warring factions. A commercial town at the centre of ancient trade routes, and the Rome for Protestants, Geneva was famous not only for the piety of its inhabitants but also for the production of watches and fine smith-work. As in so many small states across Europe, a number of rich families emerged to dominate the ruling councils of the city, whose male members served also as leading magistrates. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they built splendid houses in the upper town, away from the artisans of the lower town. Often having additional property beyond the city walls, and extensive investments in French commerce, accusations were levelled that such families were forming a patrician class, ruling for themselves rather than the public good.

Source: BnF, Gallica.

The group of Genevans making such a claim became known in the 1750s as the représentants, because they repeatedly made representations or complaints to the General Council of all citizens and bourgeois that morality was collapsing, and that the ruin of the city was imminent because of the influence of France over the chief magistrates, themselves corrupted by a lust for luxury and lucre. Divisions became acute between représentants and magistrates in the early 1760s, and especially after the représentants recruited Geneva’s most famous son, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to their cause. Rousseau, characteristically, was so independently minded that his Lettres écrites de la montagne satisfied few of the représentants, but he was presented by their enemies as demagogue in chief, whose works were designed to put an end to government and religion. Just as at Paris, Rousseau’s Contrat social and Émile had been burned at Geneva in 1762. As soon as his Lettres began to circulate in the city in December 1764, arguments were being made that Rousseau’s deadly doctrines would bring anarchy to Geneva.

The magisterial party at Geneva, called négatifs in the 1760s and constitutionnaires in the 1770s and after, reached a compromise with the représentants by agreeing to constitutional reforms in 1767. By the early 1780s, however, the représentants were demanding further change, and once more were branded as Rousseauists, advocates of an ideology that, if brought to power, would see an end to civil order and possibly civil war. For the magistrates, precisely this happened on 5 April 1782 when the people rebelled. The représentants had not fomented revolution but they took control of the city, imprisoned several magistrates, and initiated projects intended to create a new constitution and greatly increase equality at Geneva. One of the reasons the représentants had not wanted to take power by popular revolution was that they knew they risked the wrath of France. France’s foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, was close to numerous magistrates, and of the view that a popular republic on the borders of France could not be stomached. Vergennes was cunning, and he put together a combined invading force that included Geneva’s traditional ally among the cantons, Bern, and Geneva’s traditional foe, Savoy. By the end of June, twelve thousand troops had reached the walls of the city, erected bulwarks for their cannons and mortars, and prepared for siege. The besieged were branded anarchists and terrorists, who had put an end to the legitimate government of the city state and replaced it with a wild democracy in which neither property nor life was safe.

Plan de l’attaque de Genève (source: Bibliothèque de Genève).

Within the city, since the April revolution the people of Geneva had rebuilt the walls and put gunpowder in the cathedral of St Pierre and in the houses of deposed magistrates. Their goal was not victory. Everyone knew that they could never stand against France, and especially against a France supported by the most powerful canton in addition to Savoy. Rather, the people considered themselves to be preparing for martyrdom. The intention of the inhabitants was to send a message to the wider world. Through their deaths and the accompanying destruction of the city of Geneva, which would be set aflame as soon as the invaders used mortars, they would reveal the extent to which both Protestantism and republicanism were in danger in the 1780s. Someone in another part of Europe might listen and take action against the forces of oppression and corruption; the Genevan martyrs would then not have died in vain.

Entrée des troupes suisses et françoises dans Genève (source: Bibliothèque de Genève).

In fact, many people within the city awoke on the morning of the 1^st of July to find that the invading troops were already inside the walls. The représentants who remained in the city had opened the gates and surrendered as soon as their friends had left by boat. Resistance became futile and Geneva was saved. The price, many contemporaries felt, was that Geneva was no longer independent, having become a French protectorate. As a theatre was built within the city in order to entertain the invaders, many also embraced the view that Geneva was no longer a bastion of Calvinist morality. Republicans and Calvinists who remained at Geneva tended to be particularly despondent about the future in the early 1780s.

What happened to the now exiled représentants who had fled to Neuchâtel? This is where the story becomes interesting and remains little-known. The représentants had strong links with Britain, in part because the politician Charles Stanhope, known as Lord Mahon, had lived at Geneva in the 1760s and considered himself to be a représentant. Stanhope put the représentants in touch with William Petty, 2^nd Earl of Shelburne between 1761 and 1784, who became prime minister soon after the Genevan revolution was crushed, on the 4^th of July 1782. Shelburne was facing crisis at home because Britain had been defeated in war by the new North American republics, who were fighting against Britain alongside France, the Dutch Republic and Spain. Peace negotiations had commenced and many felt that Britain, like Geneva, was another Protestant state on the edge of collapse.

A young lawyer called François d’Ivernois, who was one of the editors of the Geneva edition of Rousseau’s collected works, travelled to London to meet Shelburne and Stanhope. The représentants had a plan. They promised the British government that the industrious half of Geneva, hating the restored magistrates and French dominion, were willing to leave the city, taking their wealth and manufacturing skills to another place, where they might enjoy peace and liberty. A community of watchmakers could be established, bringing prosperity to a New Geneva on foreign soil. Shelburne and his friends embraced the project. Lands were offered to the Genevans in England, but the preferred location became Ireland because of the quality of the ports, but also because Ireland was deemed ripe for improvement. Rebellious tendencies in Ireland, in the midst of the volunteer movement demanding economic and political reform, might be assuaged by the creation of New Geneva.

The location that was ultimately chosen was a substantial tract of land at the confluence of the ‘Three Sisters’ rivers – the Barrow, Nore and Suir, just outside Waterford. Funds were granted to the Genevans to the level of £50,000 and a city was mapped out. Land was purchased, buildings were erected and around a hundred families made the move from Geneva to Ireland. Most of the leaders of the April revolution at Geneva in 1782 took an oath of allegiance to George III and became Irish subjects of the crown in 1783. Then things began to go wrong. The first disaster was Shelburne’s fall from power, accused by members of parliament and the country of signing up to an ignominious peace. The ongoing crisis in Britain and in Ireland meant that his successors were less interested in New Geneva. This meant that the complaints of the Genevans who had made the journey, that funds to help them were not being released, that no further buildings were being erected and that life in Waterford was as poor and as miserable as it had been at Geneva, fell on deaf ears. The Genevans, seeing conspiracy everywhere, expressed the view that their enemies in France and in the old city also had friends at Westminster and at Court, who were promoting their view that they were dangerous extremists who would bring terror and anarchy to Ireland, just as they had in Geneva. By 1785, just as the buildings were finished, the Genevans gave up. They were convinced that the Protestant noblemen responsible for the project in Ireland were taking the funds for themselves and would never allow New Geneva to become a reality.

The final chapter of the story is more bizarre still. The buildings of New Geneva were turned into a barracks for regiments serving in Ireland or en route for foreign climes. In 1798 New Geneva, now called Geneva Barracks, became a prison for United Irish rebels against the British crown. It became infamous for the dreadful conditions suffered by the prisoners and the executions that occurred within its walls. Ballads such as Carole Malone’s ‘The Croppy Boy’ restated contemporary assertions that rebels were illegitimately massacred at Geneva in Ireland. Although New Geneva was constructed as an asylum for exiled republicans, it became a place for the imprisonment and extermination of Irish republicans. Like the Genevans before them, they too were accused of being anarchists and terrorists.

– Richard Whatmore

Richard Whatmore’s ‘Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans. The Genevans and the Irish in time of revolution’ will be published by Princeton University Press in August 2019.

 

Exploring multilingual digital editions

The Taylor Institution Library recently launched a new course teaching digital editing, with students able to create digital editions in any language of their choice. I was delighted to be able to contribute by designing the accompanying website on which the texts are published:

I am the editor and developer of several academic resources, including the award-winning Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive (currently English-language poetry only) and the Thomas Gray Archive. My interest in working with multilingual materials was sparked by part of this resource: ‘Gray’s Elegy in Translation’. According to the Digital Miscellanies Index (DMI), Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country-Churchyard’ (1751) is the most anthologized poem of the eighteenth century, and it is one of the most widely and frequently translated, paraphrased, and imitated poems in the English language. With to date at least 266 translations into at least forty languages, the Elegy has inspired translators ever since the earliest translations into Latin appeared in the early 1760s. Since those early translations, the Elegy has been influential in the history of many national literatures, particularly in the context of the evolution of European Romanticism.

Drawing on the extensive collection of Elegy translations compiled by Tom Turk,(1) the purpose of the project is firstly to enable the study of the evolution of translations of the poem in a single language and culture, and secondly to allow for a comparative study of the translations across languages and literatures, initially within, but ultimately beyond European boundaries. The first phase of the project covers the period up to 1805, comprising fifty-seven verse and prose translations of the Elegy in eleven languages (Danish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh). The translations variably highlight changes in the understanding and interpretation of Gray’s poem, reflect cultural borrowings and transfers, betray changes in literary taste, and may even allow us to uncover the circumstances, agency, and purpose of their production in the first place. Thanks to James D. Garrison’s outstanding work,(2) we have a sense of the national context of Gray’s significance in both France and Italy, but for many other European and particularly non-European languages, these histories remain to be written.

The two main objectives for the project website were to provide an intuitive interface to the translations that allows for easy comparison of equivalent passages and to allow users to comment on any part of the original or any of the translations. In the full-text view up to three texts (in any combination of languages) can be explored side-by-side in their entirety, ‘equivalent’ passages are highlighted when hovering over any stanza or paragraph:

In the detailed view any one stanza from any text can be compared with its ‘equivalents’ (if available) in either all of the translations or the translations in a particular language:

Users can add a translation or comment on a translation of any section of any of the texts using a simple click and drag action to mark the section to be annotated:

I would love to gain a better understanding from practitioners on which avenues to pursue (linguistic, stylistic, semantic etc.) for both the enhanced mark-up of the translations and the development of tools (and/or integration of external services, such as dictionaries/thesauri) to provide via the interface. Having caught the multilingual bug, I am also very keen to expand another resource of which I am editor, the Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive (already mentioned above), to include poems in other languages, along with tools for their analysis. Anyone reading this who might be interested in contributing to this endeavour, please get in touch!

I hope you will have a chance to explore the translations, and would love to hear about your experience with the current interface and any changes, improvements, or additions you would like to see in the future. If you can see the potential for any of the techniques mentioned to be applied in the Taylor Editions website, then I would be very happy to explore this further. Please do not hesitate to contact me with your feedback.

– Alexander Huber (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
Editor, Thomas Gray Archive

(1) Thomas N. Turk, ‘Search and Rescue: An Annotated Checklist of Translations of Gray’s Elegy’, Translation and Literature 22(1) (Spring 2013): 45-73.

(2) James D. Garrison, A Dangerous Liberty (Newark, University of Delaware, 2009). Garrison covers a wide range of languages, with particular emphasis on French and Italian, and to a lesser extent German, Russian and Spanish.