Dix raisons de lire et d’aimer ‘La Henriade’ de Voltaire

La Henriade a obtenu le privilège – rarissime – d’être considérée, du vivant de Voltaire, comme un classique, une œuvre qui pouvait être étudiée en classe. Les rééditions incessantes jusqu’au XIX^e siècle, ou les parodies et les traductions en plusieurs langues, témoignent de l’énorme succès de ce poème épique, et cela en dépit des réactions sévères et partisanes de la part des détracteurs de l’auteur. Voltaire a défendu avec détermination son épopée, et se désigne de surcroît, dans le titre d’une œuvre-testament, ‘auteur de La Henriade’; cette périphrase attribue au poème une marque de distinction au sein d’une production foisonnante ainsi qu’une valeur métonymique, à savoir le chef-d’œuvre destiné à entrer dans le temps de Mémoire. Néanmoins, du point de vue historiographique, les critiques ont réussi à s’imposer au fil du temps, la défaveur pour un genre en déclin comme l’épopée ayant sans doute été fatale.

Si on peut supposer que tout le monde connaît le titre ‘La Henriade’, on ne peut pas affirmer pour autant que tout le monde ait lu l’œuvre. Elle n’a jamais été introuvable: véritable succès de librairie, il a toujours été facile de se procurer une édition parue au XVIII^e ou au XIX^e siècle. Parmi les éditions modernes, il faut remonter cependant à celle procurée par O. R. Taylor en 1970 pour les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, savante et volumineuse, idéale surtout pour la consultation. Un demi-siècle après celle-ci paraît enfin une nouvelle édition.

C’est là l’occasion de se forger soi-même une idée sur ce poème épique, sans intermédiaires, en délaissant les critiques normatives de La Beaumelle et Batteux, reprises plus récemment par Pierre Bayard. Il y aurait alors au moins dix bonnes raisons de lire et d’apprécier, voire d’aimer La Henriade:

1° La première raison est que l’on peut se procurer enfin une édition récente et commentée de La Henriade, parue chez Classiques Garnier, plus maniable malgré les autres textes qui l’accompagnent. Dans l’Essai sur les guerres civiles, Voltaire esquisse l’escalade qui aboutit aux luttes fratricides et les solutions philosophico-politiques pour mettre fin à la guerre. Dans l’Essai sur le poème épique, il explique et légitime la place de son épopée moderne en qualité de digne héritier d’Homère et de Virgile. Cette nouvelle édition, pour la première fois, met en réseau La Henriade avec des considérations poétologiques et la réflexion historienne de Voltaire.

2° Si on s’intéresse à l’histoire des guerres de religion, on pourra apprécier un récit pathétique et terrifiant du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, qui commence avec l’assassinat de Coligny, cet amiral ‘qui aimait la France en combattant contre elle’, un récit saisissant qui inspire des tragédies sur la mort de Coligny (Coligni ou la Saint-Barthelemi de Baculard d’Arnaud, 1740) ou des tableaux (L’Amiral Coligny en impose à ses assassins de Joseph-Benoît Suvée, 1787). Ce chant, que Voltaire ne retouche guère, aura contribué à fonder une mémoire visuelle de la Saint-Barthélemy que la littérature romantique saura mettre à contribution, par exemple l’épisode de Charles IX tirant avec l’arquebuse sur les huguenots depuis le Louvre, ce roi qui ‘du sang de ses sujets souillait ses mains sacrées’, crime atroce que souligne l’allitération.

‘Qui pourrait… exprimer les ravages / Dont cette nuit cruelle étala les images!’ (La Henriade, chant 2). Voltaire avait suggéré quelques modifications que Gravelot n’a pas retenu: ‘Je ne sais si dans le dessin de la Saint-Barthelémy, le personnage qui porte d’une main un flambeau, et de l’autre une épée, les tient dans une attitude assez terrible. Je ne sais s’il ne conviendrait pas qu’on aperçût son visage, qu’il parût enflammé de fureur et qu’il eût un casque sur la tête, au lieu de chapeau. C’est à vous, Monsieur à en décider’ (lettre passée en vente en 2022 chez Drouot).

‘Mayenne, qui de loin voit leur folle entreprise, / La méprise en secret, et tout haut l’autorise’ (La Henriade, chant 4). Le dessin de Gravelot reflète fidèlement la vision de Voltaire: ‘Je ne haïrais pas au quatrième chant quelques moines, et quelques prêtres armés; la religion éplorée les regardant avec indignation ; la discorde à leur tête, et le duc de Mayenne avec quelques ligueurs à un balcon souriant à cette milice monacale’ (lettre passée en vente en 2022 chez Drouot).

  

3° Dans La Henriade on peut lire une satire du Vatican, qui ‘de la discorde allume les flambeaux’, et du pape qui ‘met aux mains de ses fils un glaive sanguinaire’. C’est déjà tout l’esprit satirique de Voltaire qui se déploie, comme dans ses vers épigrammatiques sur la Rome catholique: ‘Inflexible aux vaincus, complaisante aux vainqueurs, / Prête à vous condamner, facile à vous absoudre’. Raisons suffisantes pour attirer les foudres de la censure catholique en France, où le poème épique fut interdit de publication, mais aussi les sympathies du lectorat protestant – et c’est à Londres que paraît, avec une dédicace à la reine Caroline, l’editio princeps en 1728.

4° Rédigé en grande partie en Angleterre, et à la découverte de ce pays, de son système politique, de la physique de Newton, La Henriade fait écho à certaines prises de positions développées dans les Lettres philosophiques. Elisabeth d’Angleterre incarne ce pays du progrès, elle qui avait su rétablir le progrès économique, politique et artistique. Après plusieurs années tumultueuses entre différentes factions, elle donne l’exemple de ce que doit être un siècle éclairé philosophiquement, entraînant la prospérité: 

‘Londres, jadis barbare, est le centre des arts,
Le magasin du monde, et le temple de Mars.
Aux murs de Westminster on voit paraître ensemble
Trois pouvoirs étonnés du nœud qui les rassemble,
Les députés du peuple, et les grands, et le roi,
Divisés d’intérêt, réunis par la loi; […].
“Ah! s’écria Bourbon, quand pourront les Français
Réunir comme vous la gloire avec la paix?
Quel exemple pour vous, monarques de la terre!
[…]
“Vous régnez, Londre est libre, et vos lois florissantes.
Médicis a suivi des routes différentes.
[…]
Le ciel qui vous forma pour régir des états,
Vous fait servir d’exemple à tous tant que nous sommes,
Et l’Europe vous compte au rang des plus grands hommes.’

5° C’est également dans ce poème qu’est proposé un premier tableau voltairien du siècle de Louis XIV, partagé entre une critique de l’absolutisme:

‘Ciel! quel pompeux amas d’esclaves à genoux
Est aux pieds de ce roi qui les fait trembler tous!
Quels honneurs! quels respects! jamais Roi dans la France,
N’accoutuma son peuple à tant d’obéissance.’

Et l’éloge du progrès des arts et des sciences:

‘Siècle heureux de Louis, siècle que la nature
De ses plus beaux présents doit combler sans mesure,
C’est toi qui dans la France amènes les beaux arts;
Sur toi tout l’avenir va porter ses regards;
Les Muses à jamais y fixent leur empire;
La toile est animée, et le marbre respire.
Quels sages rassemblés dans ces augustes lieux,
Mesurent l’Univers, et lisent dans les Cieux;
Et dans la nuit obscure apportant la lumière,
Sondent les profondeurs de la nature entière!
[…]
Français, vous savez vaincre, et chanter vos conquêtes:
Il n’est point de lauriers qui ne couvrent vos têtes.’

6° De manière plus générale, La Henriade livre les premières réflexions de Voltaire sur l’intolérance et le fanatisme religieux ainsi que sur les horreurs de la guerre, qui font écho à notre actualité. Voltaire se contente de condamner les radicalismes:

‘Je ne décide point entre Genève et Rome
De quelque nom divin que leur parti les nomme
J’ai vu des deux côtés la fourbe et la fureur.’

7° Mais La Henriade est également un poème épique, qui donne accès à la création d’un jeune poète qui n’arrêtera jamais de récrire ses vers et de repenser son poème. On pourra apprécier la cadence et la vocalité de l’alexandrin de Voltaire:

‘Au milieu de ses feux, Henri brillant de gloire, / Apparaît à leurs yeux sur un char de victoire’ (La Henriade, chant 5). Le dessin de Gravelot se conforme de nouveau à une suggestion de Voltaire: ‘Comme on a déjà gravé l’assassinat de Henri trois pour le cinquième chant, je crois que les conjurations magiques des Seize pourraient fourni un sujet très pittoresque. Il est aisé de rendre Henri quatre ressemblant, on pourrait le dessiner sur un char traversant les airs aux yeux des sacrificateurs étonnés’ (lettre passée en vente en 2022 chez Drouot).

‘Quand un roi veut le crime, il est trop obéi:
Par cent mille assassins son courroux fut servi,
Et des fleuves français les eaux ensanglantées,
Ne portaient que des morts aux mers épouvantées.’

8° La structure narrative des dix chants a été critiquée puisqu’elle ferait avancer rapidement l’action, mais aujourd’hui on appréciera sans doute qu’on ait renoncé aux descriptions fastidieuses sur les préparatifs militaires ou sur les affrontements guerriers au profit de l’esprit de paix et de tolérance qui est défendu dans le poème ainsi que d’une action qui progresse avec détermination vers cet horizon.

9° La Henriade est une œuvre complexe, accompagnée de plusieurs autres paratextes que Voltaire a orchestrés dans les moindres détails. Des illustrations devaient être intégrées dans la toute première édition, parue avec le titre La Ligue (1723), et Voltaire entretient les contacts avec les dessinateurs et les graveurs les plus importants, tels que Charles Dominique Eisen ou Gravelot, pour réaliser un livre mémorable au niveau de sa matérialité.

10° Plusieurs autres paratextes accompagnent La Henriade, inséparable de ces textes programmatiques qui défendent et illustrent le poème épique, comme l’épître du roi Frédéric II de Prusse, qui célèbre Voltaire comme à la fois philosophe et historien, et surtout poète qui n’a rien à envier à Virgile. Dans ces textes historiques, on découvrira également la portée ludique de La Henriade, notamment dans le rapport entre la gravité du texte épique et l’insolence de certaines notes, comme celle de la mort du père du héros, le roi Antoine de Navarre, ‘le plus faible et le moins décis’, décédé en urinant.

En parcourant le texte, les deux essais, les paratextes ou en s’intéressant à l’histoire éditoriale d’une œuvre aussi riche que complexe, on pourra ainsi lire, voire découvrir La Henriade et s’en faire une idée peut-être plus juste.

En guise d’introduction, on pourra suivre cette présentation de Jean-Marie Roulin donnée au château de Coppet, et suivie d’une lecture de quelques extraits par Pilar de la Béraudière.

– Daniel Maira (Université de Göttingen) et Jean-Marie Roulin (Université Jean-Monnet Saint-Étienne / IHRIM)

Between freedom and formality

A critical edition of Voltaire’s Complete Works, begun in 1968

When, in 1958, Roland Barthes described Voltaire as ‘the last happy writer’, the accolade was surprisingly valedictory. Voltaire had customarily been acclaimed as the first, not the last, of a kind. Proud to have introduced Shakespeare to the French, he was also, it seems, the first to have written about Newton’s apple. Described as the first author of science fiction, Voltaire would become the first major writer to occupy the Panthéon in Paris, to which his remains were transferred in 1791.

Barthes did not mean that Voltaire was exceedingly cheerful; rather, that the philosopher was a serene, intellectually untroubled writer. This contrasts with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire’s unhappiest foil and his perpetual neighbour in the Panthéon. Rousseau was frustrated, tormented, given to self-sabotage, in the face of Voltaire’s smirking complacencies. ‘Jean-Jacques écrit pour écrire’, scoffed Voltaire, who viewed his own writing as an essential intervention, called into existence by particular moral or social purposes rather than by abstract philosophising.

In 1968, as French students were challenging authority, praising theory and allowing themselves, under Barthes’s imprimatur, a certain revolutionary disdain for Voltaire, the first blocks in a monument to the great man were quietly being put into place. The enigmatic Theodore Besterman, who had previously edited Voltaire’s voluminous correspondence, embarked on a new critical edition of his Complete Works. The gargantuan project’s first home was in Geneva, then it moved to Banbury and, finally, Oxford University. There, at the Voltaire Foundation and under the direction of Nicholas Cronk, who took over the project in 2001, Voltaire’s Complete Works are this year finally, triumphantly complete.

 

When compiling the hundreds of writings by Voltaire, previous editors had insisted on the purity of different genres, and generally required prose and poetry to keep a healthy distance from one another. According to this logic Voltaire was, first and foremost, a tragedian and a poet. The first nine volumes of the so-called Kehl edition (1784-1789, named after its place of publication), the first to be published after Voltaire’s death, contain his plays. There then follows his epic poem, the Henriade (1723). Between volumes 16 and 26 he is a historian. Only in the later volumes do we really meet the satirist and philosopher, the author of so many miscellanies grouped under the expedient title of Mélanges, while Candide (1759) is to be found lurking among the ‘Romans’ grouped in volume 44.

This arrangement was misleading, since it had the effect of making Voltaire seem both more predictable and more respectable than he actually was: it was easy to ignore the mischievous wit largely confined to the works further down the shelf. In this way, Voltaire could be understood as starting out a poet before becoming a philosopher after his trip to England in the 1720s. This illusion is dispelled by the newly complete Oxford edition, which presents a more authentic version of Voltaire, whose disparate compositions now succeed each other in more or less the order they were written. His tragedies accordingly now mingle with his works of prose. Diderot likened the elderly Voltaire bashing out alexandrines to an old man unable to stop chasing girls. Voltaire himself remarked that to be a tragedian, it was necessary to have balls: you needed really to be a young man. But, as was often the case with Voltaire, he would set out an apparent expectation, the better to defy it himself, and the tragedies kept coming.

These tragedies, such as Mahomet (1741) and Sémiramis (1749), now seldom performed, today come across as weary and formulaic. It is ironic that ‘the death of tragedy’ identified by George Steiner seems only to have been hastened by Voltaire’s proclivity. The new edition allows us better to appreciate the curious tension between what Lytton Strachey described as Voltaire’s ‘aesthetic timidity’, as exemplified by the tragedies, and the ‘speculative audacity’ of his thought.

Split into nine volumes, the Essai sur les mœurs is the longest of Voltaire’s works included in the Oxford edition of the Complete Works.

Even in the monumental surroundings of Cambridge University Library, the 205 collected Oxford volumes are an awesome sight. The full scale and range of Voltaire’s seemingly irreconcilable writing here comes to the fore. Lifting the works out of the order artificially imposed by previous editions, this complete edition mirrors the serendipitous logic of texts such as the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770-4) or the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), which delight in surprising juxtapositions. A reader is not expected to accompany the author from start to finish through these texts: given the myriad overlapping ideas, anecdotes and arguments, it is always possible that, in looking for one thing, the reader will find another.

In recent years the image of a pre-eminently ‘happy writer’ has been replaced by that of an angry opponent of fanaticism. Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance (1763) is, unfortunately, of renewed relevance in our age of extremity. His intellectual and moral preference for toleration can be traced to his experience of and engagement with English thinkers, notably John Locke. It seems appropriate that the final volumes of the Oxford edition turn to Voltaire’s formative time in England (1726-8) and the publication of the Lettres sur les Anglais on his return to France.

One imagines too that the bibliographical puzzle the text presents might also account for its place at the end of the queue. The difficulties begin with the title. Should we be calling this work the Lettres sur les Anglais or Lettres philosophiques, as it has sometimes been known? Or perhaps we should refer to it by its first English title, Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733)? After all, it was published in English before French, and it seems plausible that Voltaire had himself written this text in English. No tourist, he was apparently serious about becoming an English writer. It is now beyond doubt, however, that the English version is a rather free translation of a lost manuscript. The editors include it because the work was overseen, to some extent, by Voltaire himself. This English text forms Volume 6A (II). Volume 6A (I) offers a comprehensive introduction, while Volume 6B is devoted to its French incarnations: the Lettres philosophiques (1734) and Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglais (1734). Volume 6C consists of Voltaire’s Lettre sur M. Locke (1736).

The plaque marking Voltaire’s former lodgings at 10 Maiden Lane, a short walk south of Covent Garden. It was installed in 1994 by Westminster City Council and the Voltaire Foundation.

Voltaire’s letters paint an idealised picture of the cultural and political life he discovered in England: we could almost be looking at one of Canaletto’s sunlit views of London. But the text is tantalising in allowing shadows to fall across its pages. From the first moment that Voltaire comes face to face with a Quaker, the characteristic Voltairean tension between freedom and formality is palpable. His many quotations from English authors seem to show, too, an English propensity to melancholy.

The Lettres sur les Anglais, to use the overall title the editors have chosen, is a highly apposite place to see out the edition, a project that has been through five editors, more than two hundred contributors and fifty-three years. This work accounts for decisive influences on Voltaire, while his letter on Pascal (the twenty-fifth Lettre philosophique) is about as serviceable a statement of Voltaire’s philosophical credo as one can hope to find. Typically his position emerges only once he has felt a need to oppose and ‘rectify’ that of another writer, in this case ‘the sublime misanthrope’ who, Voltaire opined, had wasted his talents on religious speculation.

There is another reason for which the Lettres sur les Anglais provides a suitable finale: Nicholas Cronk himself has edited the two final volumes. His skills in choosing and cajoling numerous editors to contribute over the past twenty years should not be underestimated. I remember one of his predecessors remarking, with a doleful shake of his head, that a number of his designated editors had died without telling him. Cronk has the command of the technical and bibliographical detail essential to this project, but he has also allowed himself some latitude in introducing and contextualising the work. In common with the members of his team, past and present, he is, in his evaluations of Voltaire, generous but never idolatrous, a risk inherent in an all-consuming project of this size. When, at the beginning of this enterprise, with war with Germany still in the memory, Besterman edited the letters Voltaire exchanged with Frederick II, he could not resist using his footnotes to boo at the Prussian from the margins. Cronk’s editorial restraint in refraining from overt interpretation and speculation, let alone disapproval, while maintaining a uniform tone and approach throughout is remarkable.

It is, then, surprising when a newly discovered sketch by Hogarth, potentially of Voltaire in the company of Martin Folkes, is included at the end of Volume 6A (I), complete with a discussion by Anna Marie Roos; it is an unexpected bonus, perhaps marking a momentary relaxation of bibliographical norms. We cannot even be sure that the gentleman who looks like Voltaire was Voltaire, but this is a pleasing touch. Even if this edition offers the definitively last word on Voltaire, and will surely be the last scholarly project of this magnitude to be printed on paper, we are reminded that there will continue to be new discoveries and discussions.

– John Leigh, Senior Lecturer in French at Cambridge University and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College

First published by the TLS on 2/9/2022

Meet the Suassos – tracing a family tree among Voltaire’s London patrons

One of the pleasures of exploring the recently completed Œuvres complètes de Voltaire is occasionally stumbling across hidden treasures which can enrich our understanding of the writer’s life and work. One such treasure, found in volume 6A, is the list of 342 subscribers who supported the publication of his epic poem, La Henriade, in London in 1728. It provides a fascinating insight into his connections and networks in the English capital and beyond. The list is printed in what could first appear to be a rather haphazard fashion, and certainly not in anything so easy to navigate as alphabetical order by name. Yet as one begins to delve into the identities behind the names, it becomes clear that certain family groups and other social and professional relationships are hidden in the ordering of the list.

René Pomeau has already illuminated some of these milieux and networks.[1] He identifies the Mendes d’Acosta family of bankers; a literary contingent that includes Horace Walpole, Congreve and Swift; an intellectual group, with Samuel Molyneux, Anthony Collins, Rev’d Dean Berkeley and Newton’s nephew John Conduitt; Anglicans and Quakers; some names plausibly from London’s Huguenot community; families belonging to the British aristocracy; and finally a number of ambassadors or other diplomats from Protestant European states (Denmark, Brunswick, Sweden, Holland, and Prussia).

But a list of subscribers should not be confused with a list of everyone known to Voltaire in England at the time. Just as those creating online petitions today exhort signatories to share the petition with their friends and family, so it appears to have been with literary subscriptions in the eighteenth century. Beyond the obvious names and the famous ones, then, many wider circles emerge from the list, often grouped together, but sometimes surprisingly not.

Detail from page nine of the list of subscribers to La Henriade (London, 1728), including the elusive Suassos.

As we worked to prepare this volume for publication, the names ‘Honourable Baron Swasso’, ‘Honourable Lady Swasso’ (p.9) and ‘Alvaro Lopes Swasso, Esq.’ (p.10) at first resisted identification. But family connections, in this case unearthed by Norma Perry, turned out to be the answer. The first two names appear in the list of subscribers just ahead of a group from the Mendes Dacosta family, mentioned above as one identified by René Pomeau: Anthony Moses Dacosta and his wife Catherine (‘Mrs Catherine D’acosta’). This couple (also cousins) were members of a large family who had emigrated to London to escape anti-Semitic persecution in Portugal in the seventeenth century, and had become naturalised and prosperous in their new home city. Another cousin, Anthony Jacob Dacosta, was a banker who had speculated badly and ended up bankrupt, ultimately fleeing to France at the end of 1725.

One of Anthony Jacob’s enraged creditors was none other than Voltaire himself, who, upon trying to present him with letters of credit in the summer of 1726, was apparently furious to find that his man had lost all his money and fled the country. Perry suggests that Voltaire may have encountered Anthony Moses while searching for Anthony Jacob. The ensuing interview went unexpectedly well given the circumstances: Voltaire appears to have subsequently been on friendly terms with Anthony Moses and his immediate family. Perry also proposes that Voltaire may have attended social gatherings at their main residence, Cromwell House; he certainly noted a witty exchange with Catherine in his notebook of the period: ‘Madame Acosta dit en ma présence à un abbé qui voulait la faire chrétienne, votre dieu, est-il né juif? Oui. A-t-il vécu juif? Oui. Est-il mort juif? Oui. Eh bien soyez donc juif.’ (Madame Acosta said in my presence to a cleric hoping to convert her to Christianity, Was your God born Jewish? Yes. Did he die Jewish? Yes. Well then, become Jewish. [Translation source])

Portrait of Alvaro Lopes Suasso by Catherine da Costa (1718, Joods Historisch Museum).

But, to return to our Suassos, the proximity of the Mendes Dacosta family to the baron and Lady ‘Swasso’ in the list was the clue which led us to their identity. Anthony Moses and Catherine’s daughter, Leonor Rachel, was married to the Dutch-Jewish baron Antonio Lopes Suasso, and was thus the ‘Lady Swasso’ of the subscribers. And Alvaro Lopes Suasso, who appears further down in the list on page ten, was Antonio’s brother. The Suassos were an eminent banking family in the Netherlands, fervent supporters of the House of Orange. Like Voltaire himself, Alvaro later became a member of the Royal Society, which Voltaire compares to the French Academy in the Lettres sur les Anglais, and our old friend Catherine da Costa, a talented miniaturist, painted his portrait, as well as (probably) that of her Suasso grandchildren (‘[Two young children holding an orange]’, gouache on ivory, ex Sothebys, 16 March 1999).

We can also identify Anthony Moses’ younger brother, Joseph. He subscribed for two books for himself, suggesting an even keener interest in either the work or the author than his brother had. Even Catherine’s brothers, Anthony and James ‘Mendoz’ (Mendes) put themselves down for a copy each. Directly below them, we find a certain ‘Abr. Telles, Esq’, who seems on initial research to have further Dutch-Jewish connections – perhaps another family friend, though we have not yet managed to pin down a specific relationship. And he had already subscribed to at least one other book alongside assorted Suassos and da Costas, a 1725 Vocabulary in Six Languages (which lists its subscribers in alphabetical order).

Details from pages five and nine of the list of subscribers to R. J. Andrée, A Vocabulary in Six Languages (London, 1725). Present in the list is Abraham Telles, along with several members of the da Costa and Suasso families.

Voltaire may have known other members of the family too, but it must be the case that some were approached to subscribe not by the author himself, but by other relations acting as intermediaries. Even this small section of the list of subscribers, then, which might at first glance appear an arid document devoid of interest, is testament to the influence of family connections in literary patronage of the period, and to the effectiveness of networks in a world before social media. These lists are rich sources of information and we can guarantee that there will be more stories to tell about this one in particular.

– Alison Oliver and Gillian Pink

---

[1] In ‘Voltaire en Angleterre. Les enseignements d’une liste de souscription’, Littératures III 4 (January 1955), p.67-76 (repr. Revue Voltaire 1, 2001, p.93-100).

Peril at sea: the digital search for allusions in Voltaire’s epic poetry

Tesserae-OBVIL is an intertextual search tool currently being developed with support from the Voltaire Foundation, designed to compare French and Latin texts and locate possible poetic allusions between them. In this blog post, developer and Vf Post-Doctoral Fellow James Gawley explains several new allusions found with Tesserae-OBVIL that deepen our understanding of the Henriade, one of Voltaire’s most important, yet least-studied works.

The Henriade

Louis-François Charon, Voltaire à la Bastille composant la Henriade, 1822, print, 48.2cm x 34.7cm, Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

In 1717, Voltaire was thrown into the Bastille for writing and distributing scurrilous verses about the Regent. In his cell, he began to compose a new poem called the Henriade. In contrast to the short, scandalous verses that had put him in prison, this would be a national epic designed to trumpet France’s place in the world and in world literature. Voltaire’s ambition was huge: unlike Greece and Rome, and unlike other modern European nations, France lacked a national epic, a crowning work of literature that could give the country a sense of national identity.

The poem made its author a celebrity. For the eighteenth century, Voltaire was the author of the Henriade. It was quickly translated into many languages and published in almost every European country. Voltaire even lived to see an American edition released in 1778. Yet today, we hardly know what to make of his epic. There is little critical work published on the poem, and print editions are rare in libraries and non-existent in bookstores. Simply put, something considered to be Voltaire’s masterpiece by his contemporaries is virtually unknown to modern readers. One key missing element is the classical context, obvious to eighteenth-century readers, but increasingly obscure today.

Tesserae-OBVIL

Allusion, at its simplest, is the adaptation of a recognisable passage or phrase in the text of a new poem. Allusion is not rote copying; it depends on an adaptation of old material, meaning that the words or the context are altered to create something new. Nor is it plagiarism, since the author intends for the reader to recognise the borrowed material. In fact, the word ‘allusion’ is derived from the Latin ludus, or ‘game’. This game was much easier for Voltaire’s readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when epic poetry and its allusive tradition were taught in schools. Today, expertise in both the Latin epic tradition and the literature of the Enlightenment is rare. So that new readers might come to appreciate the Henriade, I have adapted the open source Tesserae Project to search for allusions that connect French epic poetry with its Latin predecessors. The tool (in its current, early form) is called Tesserae-OBVIL.

Detail of La Tour’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour showing the Henriade on her bureau. Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Portrait en pied de la marquise de Pompadour, 1749-1755, 175cm x 128cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Poets use a very small amount of shared language to connect themselves to their predecessors; once the connection is formed in the reader’s mind, the alluding poet changes the text as much as possible. So instead of looking for passages with a large number of similarities, Tesserae-OBVIL looks for places where just two or more words are shared between poems within a single phrase. The system then filters these points of similarity according to the rarity of the shared words and their proximity to one another on the page. The user still has to interpret the search results, sifting out the meaningful allusions. Yet even with false positives in the search results, Tesserae-OBVIL makes it easier for us to read the Henriade as Voltaire’s contemporaries did, with an eye for epic allusion and intimate knowledge of the Latin epics.

Allusions in the Henriade

The genre of epic poetry depends on allusions. References to the canon prove that a poet has done their homework. Even better, if the poet can improve on famous verses, then they elevate themself above their predecessors and take their own place in the canon. Perhaps most important, allusions in epic poetry establish the mastery of the poet’s culture. Allusions are therefore intrinsic to Voltaire’s goals in composing the Henriade.

To establish France’s literary supremacy, Voltaire had to engage closely with Virgil. This is why the Henriade starts out in the same way as the Aeneid. Both poems begin with a hero’s sea voyage to a foreign queen; Aeneas encounters Dido, while Henry IV meets Elizabeth I of England. Voltaire is taking advantage of poetic license here: though England did aid France in the wars of religion, Henry never actually met Elizabeth. Voltaire invents the scene to connect himself to Virgil, and this engagement has a competitive French twist. When the hero Aeneas is nearly shipwrecked at the beginning of Virgil’s poem, he bitterly laments his fate. This lamentation is a failure of stoic courage, which would require Aeneas to accept whatever the gods have in store for him without complaint. Voltaire reproduces this scene at the beginning of the Henriade, but when Henri believes he will be drowned, he does not rail against fate. His only lament is for the fate of France. The French hero of the Henriade is implicitly braver than the Roman hero of the Aeneid.

Aeneid 1.88–1.101

Eripiunt subito nubes caelumque diemque
Teucrorum ex oculis; ponto nox incubat atra.
Intonuere poli, et crebris micat ignibus aether,
praesentemque viris intentant omnia mortem.
Extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra:
ingemit, et duplicis tendens ad sidera palmas
talia voce refert: ‘O terque quaterque beati,
quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis
contigit oppetere! O Danaum fortissime gentis
Tydide! Mene Iliacis occumbere campis
non potuisse, tuaque animam hanc effundere dextra,
saevus ubi Aeacidae telo iacet Hector, ubi ingens
Sarpedon, ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis
scuta virum galeasque et fortia corpora volvit?’

[Suddenly clouds take sky and day away
from the Trojan’s eyes: dark night rests on the sea.
It thunders from the pole, and the aether flashes thick fire,
and all things threaten immediate death to men.
Instantly Aeneas groans, his limbs slack with cold:
stretching his two hands towards the heavens,
he cries out in this voice: ‘Oh, three, four times fortunate
were those who chanced to die in front of their father’s eyes
under Troy’s high walls! O Diomede, son of Tydeus
bravest of Greeks! Why could I not have fallen, at your hand,
in the fields of Ilium, and poured out my spirit,
where fierce Hector lies, beneath Achilles’s spear,
and mighty Sarpedon: where Simois rolls, and sweeps away
so many shields, helmets, brave bodies, of men, in its waves!’]

Compare these lines with a passage of the Henriade connected to it by Tesserae-OBVIL:

Henriade 1.166–1.176:

On découvrait déjà les bords de l’Angleterre;
L’astre brillant du jour à l’instant s’obscurcit;
L’air siffle, le ciel gronde, et l’onde au loin mugit;
Les vents sont déchaînés sur les vagues émues;
La foudre étincelante éclate dans les nues;
Et le feu des éclairs, et l’abîme des flots,
Montraient partout la mort aux pâles matelots.
Le héros, qu’assiégeait une mer en furie,
Ne songe en ce danger qu’aux maux de sa patrie,
Tourne ses yeux vers elle, et, dans ses grands desseins,
Semble accuser les vents d’arrêter ses destins.

[The coast of England is already appearing;
The bright star of day darkens all at once;
Air whistles, sky rumbles, the wave in the distance roars;
The winds are unleashed on the agitated waves;
Flashing lightning bursts in the clouds;
The fire of thunderbolts, and the abyss of the waves,
Showed death all around to the pale sailors.
The hero, besieged by a furious sea,
Thinks in this danger only of the suffering of his country,
Turns his eyes towards her, and, in his grand designs,
Seems to accuse the winds of stopping his destiny.]

The similarity between these passages is obvious when compared directly, but this allusion from Voltaire to Virgil has gone unnoted in scholarly literature. Sometimes it takes a digital search tool to show us where to look. Yet there is more to this passage than a French hero reacting more calmly than a Roman one. Allusions are often polyvalent, connecting one point of a poem with several predecessors. This near-shipwreck passage in Voltaire is one of these polyvalent allusions.

Claude Joseph Vernet, Le Naufrage, 1772, oil on canvas, 113.5cm x 162.9cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In between the Aeneid and the Henriade, another epic reproduced this scene. Lucan’s Civil War was composed some eighty years after the death of Virgil, while the emperor Nero was in power. Whereas Virgil’s epic is designed to establish Rome as a nation whose culture deserves to dominate the Mediterranean, Lucan’s follow-up poem laments Rome’s mindless and self-destructive tendencies. When Lucan sends Julius Caesar – epic hero and ancestor of the current ruler – into the storm, he portrays Caesar as unflinching in the face of death. Caesar offers no lament about the fate of himself or of Rome. In fact, he is utterly convinced of his importance and does not particularly care what happens to Rome, provided that he gets what he wants. Caesar is not a ‘hero’ in the modern sense of the word – he is heroic in scale and monstrous in ambition.

Civil War 1.88–1.101

Nubibus et coelo Notus est: si murmura ponti
Consulimus, Cori verrunt mare. Gurgite tanto,
Nec ratis Hesperias tanget, nec naufragus oras.
Desperare viam et vetitos convertere cursus,
Sola salus. Liceat vexata litora puppe
Prendere, ne longe nimium sit proxima tellus.
Fisus cuncta sibi cessura pericula Caesar,
Sperne minas, inquit, pelagi, ventoque furenti
Trade sinum. Italiam si coelo auctore recusas,
Me pete. Sola tibi caussa haec est iusta timoris,
Vectorem non nosse tuum; quem numina numquam
Destituunt, de quo male tunc Fortuna meretur,
Cum post vota venit. Medias perrumpe procellas,
Tutela secure mea. Coeli iste fretique,
Non puppis nostrae labor est: hanc Caesare pressam
A fluctu defendet onus.

[A north-westerly tempest will overcome the waves.
In such a gale, neither shipwrecked crew nor vessel
shall ever reach the shore of Italy. Our one chance
is to renounce all hopes of the passage denied us
and retrace our course. Let me seek the shore nearby
in our battered craft, lest the land proves unreachable.’
Confident that all perils would give way before him,
Caesar cried: ‘Scorn the sea’s threats, spread our sail
to the raging wind. Seek Italy at my command though
you refuse that of heaven. Only your ignorance of whom
you carry justifies your fear. Here is one whom the gods
never desert, whom fate treats unjustly if she comes only
in answer to his prayers. Thread the heart of the tempest,
secure in my protection. This turmoil concerns the sea
and sky, not our vessel: that she bears Caesar will defend
her from the waves.’]

The language of Voltaire’s near-shipwreck scene shares almost as much with Civil War as it does with the Aeneid, and if we read a little further in the Henriade, Voltaire makes the reference more explicit:

Henriade 1.177-182:

Tel, et moins généreux, aux rivages d’Épire,
Lorsque de l’univers il disputait l’empire,
Confiant sur les flots aux aquilons mutins
Le destin de la terre et celui des Romains,
Défiant à la fois et Pompée et Neptune,
César à la tempête opposait sa fortune.

[Such, and less generous, on the shores of Epirus,
When the empire of the universe he disputed,
Trusting on the waves to the mutinous aquilons
The destiny of the earth and of the Romans,
Defying both Pompey and Neptune,
Caesar opposed his fortune to the storm.]

Engraving of Henri IV from a copy of Voltaire’s Œuvres complètes (Kehl, 1785), vol.10 (La Henriade), frontispiece.

If Voltaire felt obligated to demonstrate his mastery of Virgil, he also felt obligated to demonstrate his mastery of Lucan. By including hints of Julius Caesar when he depicts Henri IV as brave in the face of the storm, he adds an ominous note to his apparent flattery of the royal family – readers recall that Caesar was responsible for a civil war that nearly destroyed Rome, and died a tyrant. This is far from the only hint of Voltaire’s personal opinions in the poem. Aeneas himself was an ambiguous hero. Throughout most of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas is a patient leader and obedient to the gods. In the poem’s final lines he gives in to rage and butchers his fallen opponent, a man who is clinging to his knees and begging for mercy. Epic poetry is always somewhat ambivalent in its praise. Given the writer’s rocky relationship with the descendants of Henry IV, I would say that Voltaire chose the medium of his praise very well.

For its original audience, the Henriade was not simply an obsequious homage to the ruling family that imprisoned Voltaire. It was a celebration of France, one that also conveyed a carefully veiled criticism of its royal family. Imprisoned for openly mocking the powerful, Voltaire used allusions to add an ironic subtext to his praise of Henri IV. It is this combination of nationalist pride and mistrust of authority – both inaccessible unless one understands the allusions beneath the surface of the text – that make the Henriade a compelling piece of literature. These complexities have been mostly lost to the reader for the past century-and-a-half, and are only now being rediscovered with digital tools like Tesserae-OBVIL.

– James Gawley, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Voltaire Foundation

Gibbon et Voltaire: une rencontre fortuite?

Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage: Béla Kapossy et Béatrice Lovis (dir.), Edward Gibbon et Lausanne. Le Pays de Vaud à la rencontre des Lumières européennes, Gollion, Infolio, 2022

Dans le cénacle restreint des spécialistes du XVIII^e siècle peu sont ceux qui ignorent le rôle fondamental qu’a joué la ville suisse de Lausanne dans l’évolution intellectuelle de l’historien Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) et dans le parachèvement de son œuvre magistrale: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vol., 1776-1788).

Par suite d’une conversion inopinée au catholicisme lors de ses années de formation à Oxford, le père du jeune Edward Gibbon décide de placer son fils sous le patronage d’un exigeant précepteur lausannois Daniel Pavillard (1703-1775), afin de lui faire retrouver le chemin de la foi anglicane.

A partir des années 1730, les étudiants étrangers deviennent nombreux à Lausanne, ville réputée pour la beauté de ses paysages et pour son académie huguenote du Refuge. La cité vaudoise, alors sous le contrôle de Berne, offre en prime un cadre politique extrêmement stable, ce qui la distingue de sa voisine Genève, périodiquement perturbée par des troubles politiques. Les précepteurs lausannois accueillent de nombreux élèves de marque, comme le comte de Lippe-Detmold. Lausanne fait dès lors partie de la crème des réseaux d’éducation internationaux européens. Une autre particularité qui distingue Lausanne de sa capitale bernoise ou de la cité de Calvin est la présence d’une noblesse oisive. Comme le rappelle l’historienne Danièle Tosato-Rigo (p. 74) l’existence d’une noblesse lausannoise garantissait que les jeunes étrangers de marque pouvaient acquérir des mœurs bourgeoises et fréquenter les cercles convenant à leur rang aristocratique.

Béla Kapossy et Béatrice Lovis (dir.), Edward Gibbon et Lausanne. Le Pays de Vaud à la rencontre des Lumières européennes (Gollion: InFolio, 2022).

C’est sur les trois séjours de Gibbon à Lausanne, les années d’apprentissage (1753-1758), l’étape du Grand Tour (1763-1764) et la retraite studieuse pour terminer le Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1763-1764) que revient l’ouvrage remarquable publié sous la direction de Béla Kapossy et de Béatrice Lovis: Edward Gibbon et Lausanne. Le Pays de Vaud à la rencontre des Lumières européennes. Comme Béla Kapossy le démontre dans l’article ‘Gibbon et les historiens lausannois’ (pp. 107-15), les années de formation lausannoises furent essentielles pour l’émergence d’une méthode historiographique chez le jeune Gibbon. Hasard de l’histoire, c’est aussi à Lausanne que Gibbon découvre et se familiarise avec le théâtre. Or il est également attiré par la personnalité de Voltaire dont il fréquente la propriété de Mon-Repos où le dramaturge organise ses représentations.

J’aimerais insister ici sur le rôle que joua Voltaire pour Gibbon, comme lointain mentor, pour son introduction à l’art théâtral et pour sa réflexion sur l’écriture de l’histoire. Comme l’illustrent les nombreux articles de l’ouvrage collectif Edward Gibbon et Lausanne, la ville vaudoise créa les conditions cadre pour l’émergence d’un laboratoire cosmopolite de la pensée des Lumières.

Gustave Courbet, Coucher de soleil sur le Léman, 1874, huile sur toile, 54.5 x 65.4 cm, musée Jenisch, Vevey.

En 1755, lorsqu’il arrive sur les bords du Lac Léman et s’installe pour l’hiver dans la propriété du Grand-Montriond entre Lausanne et Ouchy, Voltaire cherche également une retraite studieuse. De nature entreprenante, l’homme de lettres ne décrit pas les coteaux lémaniques comme un lieu de repli mais bien comme une zone de transit européen (Épître de M. de Voltaire en arrivant dans sa terre, près du Lac de Genève). Anticipant sur la teneur de l’article ‘Genève‘ pour l’Encyclopédie, rédigé par d’Alembert mais soufflé par Voltaire, l’homme de lettres souhaite également, comme le précise Béatrice Lovis, ‘apporter la civilisation aux Vaudois’ (‘Le théâtre de société lausannois vu par Gibbon’, p. 302). Gibbon est témoin de cette mise en scène des vertus théâtrales, comme il le rapporte dans son journal:

‘Avant d’être rappelé de Suisse, j’eus la satisfaction de voir l’homme le plus extraordinaire du siècle; poète, historien, philosophe; qui a rempli trente in-quarto de prose, de vers; de productions variées, souvent excellentes, toujours amusantes. Ai-je besoin de nommer Voltaire? […] Le plus grand agrément que je tirai du séjour de Voltaire à Lausanne, fut la circonstance rare d’entendre un grand poète déclamer, sur le théâtre, ses propres ouvrages’ (Gibbon, Mémoires, suivis de quelques ouvrages posthumes, vol. 1, chap. IX, pp. 100-102).

Cette découverte laissera des traces, car Gibbon qui précise son grand amour pour l’art de Shakespeare, compte également dans sa bibliothèque les œuvres d’auteurs français tels que Diderot, Carmontelle, Beaumarchais, et Madame de Genlis. Voltaire occupe dans cette collection une place à part puisque Gibbon possède ses œuvres complètes à double, imprimées à Lausanne et à Genève (p. 300). Gibbon a donc entretenu un authentique dialogue littéraire et philosophique avec l’intellectuel Voltaire.

Concernant l’écriture de l’histoire, Gibbon jugeait que l’historiographie de Voltaire était superficielle. Nonobstant son impressionnante bibliothèque, Voltaire ne recherchait pas des sources archivistiques, et il utilisait ce qui avait déjà été publié ou ce que ses correspondants lui mettaient sous la main. Cependant, malgré ses critiques sur l’approche méthodologique de Voltaire, Gibbon était fasciné par l’envergure intellectuelle de l’Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756). La philosophie de l’histoire (1764) offrait aussi une lecture des événements du récit de l’humanité qui ne devait rien à une lecture providentialiste de l’histoire.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris: Durand, 1771). Notez le but explicitement religieux du projet historique de Bossuet.

Si l’on songe au rôle essentiel que joua le Discours sur l’histoire universelle à Monseigneur le Dauphin (1681) de Bossuet dans la conversion au catholicisme du jeune Gibbon, on prendra mieux la mesure du rôle fondamental que représentait pour l’historien anglais l’explication laïque des faits historiques. Dès 1742 avec ses brèves Remarques sur l’histoire, Voltaire attaquait l’histoire ancienne. ‘L’esprit philosophique’ appliqué à la science historique devait produire un savoir prétendument utile, loin des fables et des compilations d’anecdotes qui caractérisaient les récits traditionnels. Position que Voltaire répète dès l’introduction de l’article ‘Histoire‘ de l’Encyclopédie, publié en 1765: ‘c’est le récit des faits donnés pour vrais; au contraire de la fable, qui est le récit des faits donnés pour faux’. Et il écarte d’emblée l’intérêt de ‘l’histoire sacrée’, qu’il présente comme ‘une suite des opérations divines et miraculeuses, par lesquelles il a plu à Dieu de conduire autrefois la nation juive, et d’exercer aujourd’hui notre foi. Je ne toucherai point à cette matière respectable’.

Si Gibbon fut sensible à l’envergure du récit voltairien sur l’histoire globale, les réticences furent plus nombreuses concernant la méthode voltairienne. L’historien anglais ne pouvait adhérer au scepticisme général de Voltaire pour tous les faits qui mettaient en valeur le rôle du christianisme ou de l’Église de Rome. Dans sa lutte contre l’Infâme, Voltaire dédaignait tout évènement qui ne cadrait pas avec son ironie, alors que Gibbon s’est formé à une critique rigoureuse des sources. Il cherchait à étayer les hypothèses – y compris celles qui présentaient le rôle de l’Église comme positif – par les faits rapportés par des témoins fiables et/ou consignés par les historiens les plus crédibles.

Une deuxième différence entre les deux hommes est que Gibbon s’intéresse au passé pour saisir dans la longue durée le façonnement des mœurs, alors que Voltaire perçoit l’histoire ancienne comme un objet de curiosité. L’essentiel du discours historique doit se porter selon lui sur l’histoire moderne – celle qui se fait depuis la Renaissance. C’est cette histoire-là qui est pourvoyeuse de progrès et de Lumières.

Feuille manuscrite du Essai sur les mœurs de Voltaire. Forschungsbibliothek, Gotha, Chart. B 1204 (MS G), p.4.

Une troisième différence fondamentale peut être relevée dans le style des deux historiens. Voltaire privilégie un discours fluide, ironique, quasi-pamphlétaire, alors que Gibbon respecte le travail érudit des antiquaires et fleurit ses pages de nombreuses notes où il analyse les sources discutées et en critique le contenu.

Gibbon et Lausanne, par la richesse de son contenu et l’érudition de son apparat critique, permet au spécialiste, comme au profane, une compréhension plus riche des rapports qui relient Gibbon à son environnement helvétique. Le livre réunit trente-cinq auteurs provenant de divers horizons académiques mais aussi de diverses disciplines. L’ouvrage prend pour fil rouge l’élaboration du Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire et offre une synthèse internationale des travaux consacrés au XVIII^e siècle lausannois depuis deux décennies. Les contributions sont répertoriées en sept thématiques comme ‘religion et éducation’, ‘sociabilité et divertissements’, ‘La grotte, lieu de vie et de mémoire’ ou ‘Archives et reliques’, etc. Ces catégories visent à englober les différents aspects de la vie de Gibbon et à les rattacher aux caractéristiques proprement lausannoises.

Comme l’indique Béla Kapossy dans l’introduction: ‘Avant que la cité vaudoise ne devienne la capitale olympique, Lausanne était ainsi connue comme la ville de Gibbon’ (p. 13). Les jeunes anglais romantiques avaient l’habitude d’escalader les murs de la propriété pour apercevoir les lieux où l’historien avait conclu son œuvre grandiose. Avant que ne soit construit le premier palace – le bien nommé ‘Gibbon’, sur l’emplacement de la ‘Maison de la Grotte’ – les voyageurs anglais pratiquant leur Grand Tour ou explorant les Alpes continuaient à faire de Lausanne une étape incontournable de leur périple.

Les dernières lignes du Decline and Fall sont demeurés célèbres par la description poétique qu’en donne l’auteur: alors que Lausanne est recueillie dans un calme profond, Gibbon contemple les Alpes savoyardes imperturbables et le bleu sombre du lac où se reflète la lune. L’historien suspend enfin sa plume et cède à sa rêverie nocturne.

Charles Louis Constans, Gibbon, c. 1810-1820, lithographie, 17.5 cm x 13.3 cm, British Museum, Londres. L’artiste dépeint Gibbon assis devant les Alpes dans un jardin à Lausanne.

En quittant Lausanne, lors de son deuxième séjour, Edward Gibbon note dans son journal qu’il laisse derrière lui une ville mal bâtie qui a perdu les charmes des premières fois. Ce jugement négatif s’est atténué avec le temps, car Gibbon est revenu dans la ville pour parachever le Decline and Fall. Il retourne cependant en Angleterre au crépuscule de son existence, s’installant à Londres pour consoler son ami Lord Sheffield (1735-1821) qui venait de perdre sa femme, sa santé se détériore et il finit par mourir à l’âge de 56 ans. Ironie de l’histoire qui rappelle la mort inattendue de Voltaire à Paris après de nombreuses années d’exil.

Les charmes du séjour lausannois auront atténué les rigueurs républicaines du Gibbon des années 1760, qui percevait Berne comme une république autoritaire et les Lausannois comme des citoyens qui confondaient tranquillité et liberté. Son troisième séjour réveille son intérêt pour la vieille république aristocratique helvétique, mais probablement que Berne n’évoquait plus pour lui l’État qui en Europe suggérait la grandeur des Cités-États antiques. A l’aube de ‘l’ère des Révolutions’ – selon la formule d’un autre grand historien britannique –, Berne n’était plus un exemple de conservatisme dépassé, mais un modèle de stabilité dans une Europe au bord de la rupture.

– Helder Mendes Baiao, Assistant docteur de littérature française, Universität Bern

Death of the author? Translation and the potential loss of authorship in Voltaire’s Commentaire historique

Voltaire’s autobiographical work, Commentaire historique sur les œuvres de l’auteur de La Henriade. Avec les pièces originales et les preuves (1776), is a text that challenges our understanding of the nascent autobiographical form at the end of Ancien Régime France. The text itself is divided into three sections: a prose part recounting Voltaire’s life; a collection of letters that cover an array of topics; and a poem, Sésostris. Unlike the intimate je in Rousseau’s Confessions, Voltaire’s piece is written in the third person: the narrative je and Voltaire are distinct. This stylistic peculiarity problematizes the question of whether or not Voltaire truly is the author; scholars such as I. O. Wade and Raymonde Morizot have, in fact, suggested that Jean-Louis Wagnière, Voltaire’s secretary, was the author of this work, whereas Nicholas Cronk, in his critical introduction to the Commentaire, proves that Voltaire was in fact the author. While these debates are understandably centered on the French edition of the text, I believe that a consideration of translations of this work may help us to understand the fact that there was not a fixed contemporary understanding of Voltaire’s work. The 1777 London translation, published a year before Voltaire’s death in 1778, may do just that. Despite the fact that eighteenth-century translators regularly took creative liberties in their work (for example, the English translator indicates that the poetry in the prose part is translated such that the reader will be entertained, and thus is not translated literally), I believe that the translation in the London edition highlights a degree of uncertainty around the nature of the original Commentaire historique.

Title page of the 1777 English translation.

The translation of the title is radical: Historical Memoirs of the Author of the Henriade. With some Original Pieces. To which are added Genuine Letters of Mr. de Voltaire. Taken from his Minutes. Translated from the French. The text itself undergoes a slight generic change, from the historical commentary to the memoir. The notion of ‘proof’, present in the original title, is implied here in the idea of ‘genuine’ letters, taken from Voltaire’s own minutes, which are the principal type of proof given, clarifying the ambiguous pièces originales et les preuves of the French title. It is through this substitution that we better understand what ‘proof’ means. The inclusion of the term ‘minutes’ may also be used to underscore a degree of authenticity, perhaps referencing the fact that the letters were transcribed in a way that was common near the end of Voltaire’s life: Voltaire dictated the letters, and Wagnière transcribed them. From his hand or from his mouth, the words are originally Voltaire’s. Conversely, the distance between the author and the subject of the memoirs is accentuated through the double reference to Voltaire, once implicitly, once explicitly. Lastly, the English title is perhaps inspired by the final sentence of the prose section of the Commentaire historique, translated directly as: ‘We shall now give some genuine letters of Mr. de Voltaire, from his own minutes, which are at present in our hands, and shall only publish such as we imagine may be of general utility.’ This distance, present in the text, is moved to the forefront through its inclusion in the title.

These paratextual oddities are further highlighted by the inclusion of an Advertisement that is not present in the French edition. The translator writes: ‘No character in the literary world is so universally known, nor has [sic] the works of any writer of any age been sought after with such avidity as the writing of him who is the subject of the following Memoirs.’ This introductory sentence raises a question about the perceived vagueness of the authorship. Why include this advertisement if the work is understood to be autobiographical? Perhaps the London editors are making the claim that Voltaire is in fact not the author, but rather simply the subject; perhaps they still consider that Voltaire is the author but are striving to enhance radically the distance between the author and the autobiographical subject.

Beginning of the ‘Advertisement’ in the English translation.

The beginning of the French edition of the Commentaire begins thus:

‘Je tâcherai, dans ces Commentaires sur un homme de lettres, de ne rien dire que d’un peu utile aux lettres; et surtout de ne rien avancer que sur des papiers originaux. Nous ne ferons aucun usage ni des satires, ni des panégyriques presque innombrables, qui ne seront pas appuyés sur des faits authentiques.’

The French, here, sees a movement from the je to the nous. The English, however, begins:

‘In these Memoirs, the subject of which is a literary man, we shall endeavour to avoid every thing which may not in some degree tend to the advantage of letters, and particularly make it our care to advance nothing, except on the authority of original papers. No use shall be made of the almost innumerable satires and panegyrics which have been published, unless they are found to be supported by facts properly authenticated.’

While the first-person plural ‘we’ is present in both the French and English editions, the English translator relies on it almost exclusively, removing the author – the first person singular, the je, ‘I’ – almost entirely from the text. In fact, apart from instances where the first person pronoun ‘I’ appears within a letter, the English translator seems to use it only a handful of times, sometimes directly, such as in the case, ‘Although I think nothing is more insipid than the details of infancy…’ (p. 2), and sometimes simply to turn a phrase, ‘The fanaticism of Nonotte was so great, that in I don’t know what, philosophical, anti-philosophical, religious Dictionary…’ (p. 147). Largely, however, the French je becomes the English we: ‘J’ai entendu dire’ becomes ‘But we have heard’; while ‘J’étais en 1732 à la première représentation de Zaïre…’, ‘We were present at the first representation of Zara…’ (p.13). While the je of the French allows for the insertion of a narratorial intimacy, where the je is both a witness to the events of Voltaire’s life and functions as the closest thing there is to autobiographical intimacy provided in this work, the we in the English removes any presence of a singular, autobiographical intimacy.

I would like to posit that the London translation of Voltaire’s Commentaire historique embodies contemporaneous uncertainty around the authorship of Voltaire’s autobiography. When the English edition was published in 1777, Voltaire was still alive. Are the changes thus simply superficial, ludic gestures on the part of a translator who was seeking to carry on Voltaire’s autobiographical game? Or do they lend themselves to a new understanding about how the English translators understood the authorship of the Commentaire? Regardless, the London edition complicates our understanding about the perceived authorship of the Commentaire historique following its publication near the end of Voltaire’s life.

– Ryan Brown, PhD student, University of Chicago

Voltaire and the Orient of the Enlightenment (part 2)

This contribution follows on from part 1 of ‘Voltaire and the Orient of the Enlightenment’, published last week, and is adapted from the author’s article in ‘A Companion to World literature’, edited by Ken Seigneurie, Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019.

Voltaire and the Biblical Orient

In the Protestant lands of Enlightenment Europe, in Britain and Germany especially, there were biblical scholars who became Orientalists in order to better understand the Hebrew Bible. By the second half of the eighteenth century there was widespread discussion of the ‘sublimity’ of Hebrew poetry and the Bible’s ‘Oriental’ style was an issue debated by eighteenth-century translators of the Bible: should the Orientalisms of the Hebrew original be rendered literally, as Johann David Michaelis believed, even at the risk of defamiliarizing the biblical text? Or should the Oriental style be tamed to suit the taste of the times? Even though not a reader of Hebrew, Voltaire was certainly sensitive to the ‘Oriental’ style of the Hebrew scriptures and, as a parodist and ventriloquist of genius, he took every opportunity to play with his ‘Oriental’ voice. The Oriental fiction Zadig has a parodic dedication signed by the Persian poet ‘Saadi’, preceded by a bogus ‘Approbation’ naming a Turkish chief judge, a spoof on contemporary French censorship (OCV, vol.30B, p.113-16). This parody of overblown ‘Oriental’ style becomes a philosophical discourse of choice and a favoured device in Voltaire’s high-profile campaigns of the 1760s against religious intolerance, carried on under the slogan Ecrasez l’infâme. Voltaire uses it in De l’horrible danger de la lecture (1765), a hard-hitting attack on censorship, written ostensibly in the voice of an Ottoman mufti, and again in the Epître écrite de Constantinople aux frères (c.1768) and the Avis à tous les orientaux (c.1769), both pleas for toleration and rational religion (OCV, vol.67, p.1-9, and vol.70A, p.1-10). These two polemical pamphlets, untypically, remained unpublished in Voltaire’s lifetime.

Mandement du muphti (Bodleian Library, Oxford).

When Voltaire needs to beg a favour of the duc de Choiseul, then foreign minister, he writes him a letter addressing him in the style of an Oriental potentate (9 January 1767, D13823). A mysterious text entitled Mandement du muphti, published anonymously in French in London in 1772, and claiming to be a translation from the Arabic, is a humorous attack on Voltaire, concluding with the hope that he be impaled in front of the château de Ferney. No one has ever been able to identify with certainty the author of this strange work but, given its bravura use of the Oriental voice, there is every chance that this work is by Voltaire himself, and that he is here parodying his own Oriental voice.

Voltaire clearly relishes the playful possibilities of the Oriental style but his creation of an Oriental voice is emphatically not innocent. Although himself no Hebrew scholar, he was steeped in biblical criticism and unstoppable on the subject of the illogicalities and absurdities of the Old Testament. Voltaire likes to emphasize the fictional, even fairy-tale, quality of the Hebrew scriptures, and so remind his readers of their status as an Oriental text. In 1759 Voltaire wrote to Mme Du Deffand: ‘je vous avouerai que je ne lis que l’ancien Testament, trois ou quatre chants de Virgile, tout L’Arioste, une partie des mille et une nuit’ (D8484). In this respect, Voltaire’s Orientalism takes a radical turn, for in placing the Bible and the 1001 Nights on the same footing as works of entertainment, Voltaire is using an argument from comparative literary history to undermine Christian orthodoxy. Faced by an ancient historical or theological text, Voltaire’s greatest term of abuse is to brand it a ‘fable’: as a character in Jeannot and Colin remarks, ‘Toutes les histoires anciennes, comme le disait un de nos beaux esprits, ne sont que des fables convenues’ (OCV, vol.57B, p.280). In Aventure indienne there is a hilarious description of Bacchus walking across the Red Sea without wetting his feet, these details, the narrator notes, ‘comme on le raconte fidèlement dans les Orphiques’ (OCV, vol.60B, p.253): for Voltaire to imply an equivalence between Bacchus and Moses is amusing (and he was familiar with the current of scholarship since the Renaissance that deliberately sought out comparisons between mythological and Christian figures); but to hint that biblical scriptures might be as fanciful as mythological accounts is seriously provocative. Similarly Ralph Nablow shows that a mythologicial reference in the conclusion to La Princesse de Babylone (OCV, vol.66, p.203) has a distinct biblical echo.

Voltaire, Le Taureau blanc ([London], 1774).

Voltaire’s most daring Oriental work, written when he was 80, is undoubtedly Le Taureau blanc (1773-1774), an Oriental fiction constructed on the fables of the Old Testament. As Roger Pearson writes in his translation of Candide and other stories, ‘As an Oriental tale devoted to the Bible it is unique not only among Voltaire’s stories but also among all eighteenth-century Oriental tales’ (Oxford, 2006). The heroine of the tale, princess Amaside, demands to be entertained by the stories told her by the old serpent, but she turns out to be more discriminating than Scheherazade, and is bored by all his tales from the Old Testament: ‘“I find stories like that boring,” remarked the fair Amaside, who had both intelligence and good taste … “I require a story to be essentially plausible, and not always sounding like the account of a dream. I prefer it to be neither trivial nor far-fetched … But, worst of all, when this sort of nonsense is written in an inflated and incomprehensible style, I find it dreadfully tiresome.”’

In encouraging his readers to regard the Old Testament as an Oriental text, one more among so many, he was taking his habitual relativism to new levels of impertinence, and of radicalism. The Christian Bible might be seen by some as the founding text of world literature – as it is by the Chicago professor of literary criticism Richard Moulton in 1911 in World literature and its place in general culture – insofar as it speaks across linguistic and cultural barriers, and has meaning in many different cultures in many different periods. Voltaire, in his role as literary historian, seems to take pleasure in reminding us that the Word of God is the product of a specific group of Eastern cultures.

Conclusion

Lettres chinoises, indiennes et tartares (Londres [Amsterdam], 1776) (Bodleian Library, Oxford).

Voltaire’s researches as a historian, allied to his insatiable literary interests, made him enormously receptive to world literature and it is no exaggeration to characterize him as a pioneering historian of comparative literature. Relativism is at the core of his philosophical approach, so a work like his Lettres chinoises, indiennes et tartares (1776) uses the wisdom of imagined Chinese and Indian cultures to comment on religion and politics in France. If his belief in the universality of human reason encourages him to minimize the distinctions between different literary cultures, his determination to undermine the unique position accorded to the ‘fables’ of the Old Testament encourages him to emphasize the ‘Oriental’, non-European, quality of the Hebrew scriptures. Voltaire’s unprecedented literary celebrity earned him a European, and eventually a global, readership. True, it is Goethe who is credited with inventing the word Weltliteratur, much influenced as he was by ‘Oriental’ poets; but it is hard to think that Goethe’s conception of world literature would have developed as it did had it not been for the intellectual example of Voltaire.

– Nicholas Cronk

Voltaire and the Orient of the Enlightenment

This contribution to Talking about Voltaire and the Enlightenment is adapted from the author’s article in A Companion to World Literature, edited by Ken Seigneurie, Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019.

Voltaire, like all thinkers of the Enlightenment, was well versed in classical literature and was especially interested in the world literature of his own day, reading English, Italian and Spanish, along with English translations of texts not yet translated into French, such as Camões’s The Lusiads, and the Qur’an in George Sale’s scholarly edition. He is also a historian of European literature. His Essay on epic poetry (1727), which he wrote and published in English before producing a French-language version, is a pioneering essay in comparative European literature, comparing the different European epic poets from Homer to Milton. The Letters concerning the English nation (1733) is comparative in a different way, contrasting tragedy, comedy, and lyric poetry in the French and English traditions. This is European literary history for a European audience.

J. B. Du Halde, Description de la Chine (Paris, 1735) (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

But Voltaire’s voracious literary appetite extends beyond Europe. His tragedy L’Orphelin de la Chine, first performed at the Comédie-française in 1755, has its source in a thirteenth-century Chinese play, translated into French by Joseph-Henri de Prémare as L’Orphelin de la maison de Chao, that Voltaire found included in Du Halde’s Description de la Chine (1735), a best-selling work on all aspects of Chinese culture. The philosophes of the Enlightenment were fascinated by the example of Chinese religion and culture, and they drew their information primarily from the Jesuit Du Halde, whose work was translated into English (1736), German (1747), Dutch (1774), and Russian (1774).

Voltaire’s interest in literature beyond Europe is intimately connected with his historiographical interests more generally. Before the Enlightenment, what was called ‘universal history’ in Christian Europe was invariably the history of the Christian world. A well-known example is Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1679, published 1682). Relativism is at the heart of Voltaire’s thought and he resolved to write a history of the world that would present Europe and European culture alongside other continents and cultures, so decentering Europe, and the Christian religion, from its ascendant position. The Essai sur les mœurs, as his universal history is usually known, was begun in the 1740s and appeared in its first full edition in 1756; Voltaire continued to revise the work until his death in 1778. This innovative work recounts the history of China, India, Africa, America, and the Muslim world alongside that of Europe, and the range is unprecedented. The essential ideological aim is clear: Voltaire seeks to sketch the progress of human civilization, which for him amounts to the triumph of reason; the underlying assumption is that all human cultures, whatever their apparent differences, share the same fundamental beliefs in reason and a supreme being (in this he differs from Bayle, who in the seventeenth century had praised China as a sophisticated atheistic culture, unlike that of Europe).

Voltaire’s declared ambition in the Essai sur les mœurs is not just to recite the deeds of kings and warriors but to tell the story of human intellectual endeavour. This attempt to sketch the history of culture – in practice this means, for Voltaire, literature – is remarkably innovative, even if the ambition was hard to realize, given the resources then available to him. So, in chapter 82 of the Essai, devoted to science and the arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Voltaire contrasts what he sees as the decadence of European culture with the vibrancy of the Muslim world. He discusses the Persian poet Saadi, whom he describes as a contemporary of Petrarch, and equally famous as him (OCV, t.24, p.282-83). Voltaire was able to find ample information about Saadi in d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697); but, more than that, he gives us an extended example of one of Saadi’s poems, 15 lines of exemplary alexandrine verse. Voltaire’s openness to the East turns out to be cultural appropriation on a grand scale, but the gesture was influential none the less. Jaucourt’s article on ‘Poésie orientale moderne’ in the Encyclopédie (1765; vol.12, p.839f.) is lifted directly and explicitly from Voltaire’s text, and quotes in full Voltaire’s imitation of Saadi’s verse.

Voltaire’s predilection for tendentious translation of selected literary passages – what the French call belles infidèles – is a key part of his practice of literary comparativism, and it is not only Saadi who is subjected to this process; Shakespeare and others are rewritten in the Letters concerning the English nation, and a number of Latin poets are translated, more or less freely, in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie. Of course, the ideological gesture is always to the fore: Voltaire is trying to do for literature what he does for religion – to suggest there are universal human values.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Voltaire’s attempt to reconceive universal history. The Essai sur les mœurs was a huge bestseller that reset the intellectual horizons of Enlightenment Europe. To take just one example, Adam Smith, in his Theory of moral sentiments, talks about Africans in one example (V.2.9) and on another occasion uses China in a thought experiment (III.1.46), and it is hard to imagine that he would have had such easy recourse to examples like these if Voltaire’s universal history had not paved the way. The work is equally influential regarding the history of world literature. Voltaire’s appropriation of the literature of other cultures for his own uses is a polemical gesture that he makes no attempt to hide. Even so, his determination to include literature in his treatment of world history was highly innovative and, more generally, Voltaire’s eagerness to discuss literature from outside Europe is remarkable and without precedent. As a practitioner of comparative literary study, Voltaire is a pioneer.

Charles Parrocel, Mehemet Effendi, Turkish ambassador, arrives at the Tuileries on 21 March 1721 (Château de Versailles).

Voltaire and the Oriental

In the eighteenth century Europe’s long-standing fear of the Turk was replaced by fascination. Following the failed siege of Vienna (1683) and the ensuing Peace of Karlowitz (1699), the Ottomans sent more frequent embassies to the European capitals, most famously to Paris in 1721 and 1742, where the magnificent spectacle of the ambassadors’ entourage aroused widespread comment and excitement. This eighteenth-century obsession with the Oriental made itself felt in painting and literature, in the applied arts as well as in fashion.

The actor Le Kain in the role of Genghis Khan in Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine (1765). Drawing by M. F. A. Castelle, engraved by Pierre Charles Levesque.

The Orient, used in this broad sense, embraces Turkey, Persia, China and India, and the newly fashionable interest in these cultures reinforced Voltaire’s desire to investigate culture beyond the confines of Europe. All of Voltaire’s non-European literary explorations can be loosely grouped under the Oriental label and he became celebrated for his extensive use of this exotic material. Voltaire is pioneering in the extent to which he uses Oriental subject matter in his tragedies: in addition to his play Zaïre, translated into many languages,and L’Orphelin de la Chine there are many more. To some extent, this is a question of local colour: eager to differentiate himself from the classical tragedians of the previous century, who had mainly found their sources in Greek mythology and Roman history, the Orient offered Voltaire the chance to explore new emotional terrain. Furthermore Voltaire was keen to reform French classical tragedy by giving greater importance to costumes and sets and by introducing spectacular scenic effects, and here again, in Sémiramis for example, the Oriental subject matter suited him well. Audiences loved the exotic costumes and the actor Le Kain had himself depicted as Genghis Khan in L’Orphelin de la Chine, complete with feather headdress, in a portrait that circulated widely as an engraving. There are ideological reasons for Voltaire’s choice of Oriental subject matter. He had no interest in writing tragedies about cultures alien to him and his audience, quite the contrary in fact; his desire was not to explore the emotional terrain of an ‘other’ culture, but to use the other relativistically to refract on his own. A case in point is Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète, first performed in 1741. The character Muhammad is portrayed as a despotic religious leader who manipulated the credulity of his followers to achieve his own cynical ends: Voltaire intended the work, of course, as an implicit attack on Christian religious fanaticism and he uses Islam as a cover for Christianity. Eighteenth-century audiences everywhere understood the subterfuge and the play was widely performed. Modern audiences no longer understand this relativistic strategy and the play has become all but unperformable because it is now misunderstood as nothing more than a crude attack on Islam.

Zadig, Antoine-Jean Duclos (1742-1795) after Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814) in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Kehl, 1784 (Wikimedia Commons).

It is in the field of fiction that the eighteenth century was most open to Oriental influence. Antoine Galland’s reworking into French of the 1001 Nights (1704-1717), itself the basis for translations into other European languages including English and German, enjoyed phenomenal success. Galland’s work in turn had enormous influence on the evolution of fiction all across Europe, and it has been calculated that the number of French ‘Oriental’ fictions published during the eighteenth century numbers nearly 700 (see Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque en France, 1704-1789, Montreal, 1946-1947, i.343). Voltaire is nothing if not reactive to literary fashion, and over an extended period he writes some 11 short fictions making use of this Oriental framework, amounting to nearly a half of his entire fictional production: in order of publication, Zadig, ou la destinée, Le Monde comme il va, Memnon, Lettre d’un Turc, Histoire d’un bon bramin, Le Blanc et le noir, Aventure indienne, La Princesse de Babylone, Les Lettres d’Amabed, Le Taureau blanc, Le Crocheteur borgne. In works like Zadig or La Princesse de Babylone, he plays with the Oriental motif deriving from Galland, always keeping his reader alert in the way he treads a fine line between parody and pastiche.

Voltaire is allergic to fairy tales, and fables in general, because he wants humankind to make use of reason; but he is a master of pastiche and he enjoys playing with the metafictional possibilities that the Oriental tale can create. In the article ‘Fiction’ of his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, he recounts an Oriental tale which purports to be a familiar story but which is in fact Voltaire’s own invented pastiche of the 1001 Nights. The other great narrative advantage of Oriental material was the easy pretext it provided for erotic subject matter and Voltaire makes generous use too of these opportunities. A number of French Oriental fictions, usually with a philosophical sting in the tail, were published as being by ‘M. de V… ‘: Voltaire had, of course, nothing to do with them but, in the minds of his readers, he was closely identified with the genre.

– Nicholas Cronk

A continuation of this piece, ‘Voltaire and the Biblical Orient’, will be posted shortly on this blog.

Voltaire in Korea

‘Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction’ has just appeared in Korean, published by Humanitas. The author of the book, Nicholas Cronk, collaborated with his translator, the Enlightenment scholar Minchul Kim, to write this preface specially aimed at readers in South Korea.

‘The more I would like to extend my knowledge of history, the more I realise that it is necessarily limited. An Asiatic, an inhabitant of the vast country of China scarcely knows of our existence, and our Europe is for him what Korea and northern Japan are for us.’

Jean-Baptisite Du Halde, Description de l’Empire de la Chine (Paris, 1735). (Swaen)

So writes Voltaire in one of his notebooks. He had an enduring interest in non-European cultures, as the books in his scholarly library of 6000 books clearly testify. This led him to write one of his most ambitious works, his Essay on manners (in French, Essai sur les mœurs), which is a pioneering attempt to write a universal history. Before Voltaire, so-called universal histories, like that of Bossuet written in the late seventeenth century, tended to confine themselves to the history of Christian Europe, and Voltaire set out to write a history of all nations across the globe. Not only does he seek to describe the political and military history of all the world’s nations, he also aims to talk about their religious beliefs and their culture more generally; in particular, when he can find the information, their literature. He possessed a book called Description of China (in French, Description de la Chine), published in 1735 by the Jesuit Du Halde, a hugely popular work describing many aspects of Chinese culture; and it was here, in this huge compendium of information, that he uncovered the text of a thirteenth-century Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao (translated into French by Joseph-Henri de Prémare as L’Orphelin de la maison de Chao).

Ji Junxiang, L’Orphelin de la Maison de Tchao, in Du Halde, Description de la Chine. (Wikimedia Commons)

Voltaire was so excited by this discovery that he used the play as the basis of his tragedy The Orphan of China (in French, L’Orphelin de la Chine), a tale of love, duty and final forgiveness set in the imperial palace in Beijing at the moment when Genghis Khan had invaded China. First performed at the Comédie-Française in Paris in 1755, the play enjoyed an enormous success, and such was Voltaire’s fame as a writer that translations soon followed into other European languages: English (1756), Italian (1762), German (1763), Dutch (1765), Swedish (1777), Portuguese (1783), Spanish (1787), Danish (1815) and Polish (1836). Voltaire’s use on the stage of a thirteenth-century Chinese drama thus reached an enormously wide audience all across Europe, and the play was so successful that it had an influence on European culture even beyond the theatre. Voltaire was a French writer but he was never satisfied with a purely French readership, and even in his own lifetime he enjoyed celebrity status as a writer all across Europe.

Korea is indeed mentioned in The Orphan of China, but most references to Korea in Voltaire’s writings are to be found, not surprisingly, in his historical works, especially in his universal history. In the opening chapter of the Essay on manners, he speaks of Korea as part of the vast Chinese (he means Mongol) empire, ‘at the eastern extremity of our globe’, and he describes the various conquests of Genghis Khan, including that of Korea. Voltaire is clearly frustrated by the lack of information available to him, and he freely admits that Korea is one of those countries that remains poorly known in Europe.

Reading Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine at the Salon of Mme Geoffrin, by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier (1812). (Wikimedia Commons)

While Voltaire is always interested in learning more about such nations, he is also eager to point out that the countries of the Middle East, for example, have ‘many fables’ remarkably similar to those of the Europeans – by which, of course, he means the Christian Bible (a dig at the so-called singularity of the Catholic Church). Habits in different countries from the Dardanelles to the ends of Korea may be different, Voltaire writes, and yet the basic foundation of ethical thinking is the same in all nations. There are also traditions and habits in civil life common to all parts of the globe, he claims, so for example, on the first day of the year, in Japan as in France, relatives and friends offer each other gifts. Behind the superficial differences between nations, Voltaire wants to insist that man is fundamentally the same across the globe. He is particularly keen to argue this point with regard to religion: each culture has its own way of praising God, he believes, but fundamentally we all praise the same supreme being, who created the Universe and who teaches us goodness.

This is a view that is easy to criticize. Historians of religion will point to substantial differences between some of the world’s religions. Other critics accuse Voltaire of what Edward Said calls ‘Orientalism’, that is, the patronizing colonial gesture of measuring the cultures of the Middle East by the yardstick of Europe, rather than judging them at their own value. But to be fair to Voltaire (who in any case is writing before the European colonisation of the Middle East), the sources available to him were limited, and he does try to master what scant information there is. Moreover, he is always quite explicit about his aim, which is deliberately to identify the elements of humanity that are common to all cultures. Voltaire can be accused of being Euro-centric – he could hardly be anything else – but his fundamental wish is to describe the qualities and values common to all humanity. In 1760-1761 the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith published The Citizen of the World, or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, a collection of letters written by a fictional Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi, who was supposedly living in London. The expression ‘a citizen of the world’ became current in Europe in the eighteenth century, and it would be no exaggeration to describe Voltaire as one of the first ‘citizens of the world’.

* * *

Notwithstanding Voltaire’s stature as the representative figure of European Enlightenment, and notably of its most popular version which demanded resistance to the fanaticism and dogmatism of established religions, Korean readers have so far not been treated well with books to introduce them to his world. There is only a small number of scholarly articles written in Korean by and for scholars of European studies: in the fields of history, literature, philosophy, and political theory. As for books, overshadowed by the publishing success of Rousseau’s On the Social Contract, Korean publications relating to Voltaire have been confined to translations of a small set of ‘canonical’ fictions and treatises: Candide, Oedipe, Zadig, Micromégas, Lettres philosophiques, Dictionnaire philosophique, Précis du siècle de Louis XV, and the Treatise on tolerance. Very recently there have been published a small number of works on Voltaire, almost exclusively concentrating on his thoughts about China and Confucianism, sometimes producing, from a wishful selection of quotes, a far-fetched argument about the place of ancient Chinese philosophy in European Enlightenment. Among all these books, the only ones that are frequently read are Candide and the Treatise on tolerance. There is not a single book published on Voltaire the man as a whole.

A study guide to Candide in Korean.

This is a lamentable lacuna, one which must be filled first in order to let the public know that there had indeed been a huge hole. The reading public is hungry for a succinct yet authoritative account of the man himself. South Korea is emerging as one of the world’s most dynamic and robust democracies and has recently experienced a completely peaceful yet remarkably successful revolutionary movement: the Candle Revolution of 2016–2017. Accordingly, its public sphere, aided by all kinds of old and new media, is witnessing the birth of debates which are resistant to dogmatism of all sorts and open to considering new world-views. This is the world of Voltaire, the sceptic poet who often dared not hope too loudly as he put forth his optimistic accounts of a future rid of fanaticism and despotism, a future in which the people are politically liberal and culturally refined. This is a world of gradual perfectibility, a world that can be transformed for the better by human will, an optimism part strategic and part sincere that has not always been favoured but is clearly the dominant rising voice in South Korea today. This is the world of Voltaire, crooked and complex, but also moving, demanding, and liberating.

– Nicholas Cronk and Minchul Kim

Rethinking Voltaire’s Lettres sur les Anglais: in the footsteps of Gustave Lanson

With the publication of volume 6B, containing the full annotated text of the Lettres philosophiques, we have just moved one step closer to celebrating the completion of the Complete works of Voltaire in 2021. We are familiar with the challenge of trying to make sense of a text that has hitherto been little studied – the recently completed edition of the Précis du siècle de Louis XV is a case in point. A challenge of a different sort is presented by the small number of texts that are well known and much edited: in these cases, is there anything left to say? That problem is especially stark in the case of the Lettres philosophiques, where one epoch-making critical edition, that of Gustave Lanson, casts a long shadow over those of us following in his footsteps.

Gustave Lanson at work at the Sorbonne. (Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne; photographer unknown)

Lanson was a devoted lycée teacher much involved in the reform of the school syllabus before he became professor at the Sorbonne in 1904. He didn’t just edit the Lettres philosophiques, he pretty much invented the work for the twentieth century and beyond. The title was scarcely known in the nineteenth century, and the Lanson edition of 1909 (re)created it very deliberately to turn it into a teaching text.

In the years before the First World War, when Lanson was lecturing on Voltaire at the Sorbonne, the French faculty in Oxford was still in its infancy – its only significant contribution to Enlightenment studies was from Miss Eleanor Jourdain, vice-principal of St Hugh’s, who published an account of meeting the ghost of Marie-Antoinette at the Petit Trianon… but that story must wait for another blog. Voltaire first came onto the Oxford French syllabus in 1923, when the Siècle de Louis XIV was set for the Pass School (how many students read that work now?). Then, as part of a comprehensive revision of the syllabus in 1927, it was resolved, rather boldly, that the nineteenth century should begin in 1715, and so Voltaire became a prescribed author on the Finals syllabus (where he has remained ever since): the two works chosen for ‘special study’ were Candide (in the 1913 edition of André Morize, a pupil of Lanson) and the Lettres philosophiques (in Lanson’s own edition, of course). During World War II the teaching of Voltaire carried on unchanged and, given the impossibility of importing books from France, the Oxford publisher Basil Blackwell commissioned student editions of Candide and the Lettres philosophiques. The editors had to work quickly, and Owen Taylor’s edition of Candide came out in 1942, followed the year after by the Lettres philosophiques, edited by Frank Taylor, a tutor at Christ Church. This excellent edition remains in print and was still the prescribed edition in Oxford when I studied Voltaire as an undergraduate in the 1970s. I remember my surprise when I discovered at Thornton’s in Broad Street a copy of the original 1943 printing, produced on poor-quality paper with the ‘Book production war economy standard’ logo at the front. I didn’t know it at the time, but my introduction to Voltaire by way of the Lettres philosophiques was entirely due to Gustave Lanson.

Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson (1909).

Lanson taught literature at the Sorbonne at a time when ‘French literature’ was considered inferior to ‘History’ as a university subject. He devoted much of his career to defending the seriousness of literary study, hence the pressing need to produce a ‘scientific’ edition of a literary work that would prove the credentials of this emerging subject. So, the importance of Lanson’s Lettres philosophiques was not just that it was the first proper critical edition of any Voltaire work; it was intended to be the model for all future literary scholarship, no less. As he writes in his edition of the Lettres:

‘Il m’a paru utile de donner une édition critique des Lettres philosophiques, une édition qui fût non seulement la première édition critique de cet ouvrage, mais la première aussi, à ce que je crois, d’un écrit de Voltaire, et qui inaugurât une série de travaux qu’il serait vraiment temps de commencer.’

These circumstances help to explain both the strengths and some of the oddities of Lanson’s pioneering work. The bibliographical descriptions, for example, are needlessly complicated and confusing, with their stemmas of different textual traditions that Lanson seems to have borrowed from medievalist colleagues such as Joseph Bédier. This aspect of his editorial work has not been emulated, and we hope that the bibliographical section in our new edition will be simpler and clearer to follow.

Lanson’s stemma from the second edition. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The annotation is a remarkable feature of Lanson’s edition. He explains that he does not aim to produce a historical commentary on the work, still less to say whether Voltaire’s judgements are well founded; nor does he wish to put Voltaire’s text in the context of earlier travel accounts to England (something that F. A. Taylor does in his edition). Instead, his goal is to identify and explain as precisely as possible the sources of Voltaire’s text:

‘Mon but a été d’aider à comprendre comment Voltaire a fait son livre, comment et sur quels matériaux son esprit a travaillé. J’ai voulu présenter un commentaire de “sources”, rien de plus. L’idéal eût été d’arriver à découvrir pour chaque phrase le fait, le texte ou le propos qui avait mis en branle l’intelligence ou l’imagination de Voltaire: on se fût ainsi rendu compte du travail intérieur qui les a utilisés, fécondés, déformés, transformés. Je n’ai pas besoin de dire que je n’ai pas atteint cet idéal.’

This ‘ideal’ of attempting to pin down the sources of every single phrase in the book strikes us now as somewhat surreal, and of course Lanson has been much mocked by later generations for his unrelenting positivism. Where Lanson produced his commentary in the form of long endnotes, our style of annotation is not only different in approach, it is also more concise. That said, we remain enormously indebted to Lanson’s work, which in important respects remains unsurpassed.

Letters concerning the English nation, first edition.

A particular challenge posed by this text lies in the choice of base text and the presentation of (so-called) variants. The problem begins with the fact that there is not really one first edition. The work was initially published by William Bowyer in London, in English, as the Letters concerning the English nation (1733). Early in 1734 Bowyer produced in London the first French edition, the Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglais (with the false imprint ‘A Basle’); and then later that year, another enlarged French edition was published, without privilège, by Jore in Rouen. For Lanson, there was no problem: the English edition could be dismissed as a mere translation; and the first French edition had the double disadvantage of being foreign and of being less complete (it lacked the 25^th letter on Pascal). It seemed obvious to him that the ‘real’ version of the text was the one published in France, the one that had caused the scandal that nearly landed Voltaire in jail. And so this multi-faceted work became reduced to the Lettres philosophiques, and the other two early versions, though noted, were eclipsed. There have been many editions of this work since 1909, and all editors have followed Lanson in their basic decision to choose the Jore printing over the other two.

Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglais, first edition in French.

It was an American scholar, Harcourt Brown, who first confused this picture by arguing intriguingly in an article of 1967 that Voltaire had composed about half of the text in English, and that the Letters concerning the English nation were in fact part English original and part translation. His arguments were taken further by André-Michel Rousseau, who in 1964 had updated Lanson’s edition of the Lettres philosophiques, and who wrote a remarkable doctorat d’état on L’Angleterre et Voltaire. A.-M. Rousseau was originally invited to edit this work for the Complete works of Voltaire, and in a lecture given at the Taylor Institution in Oxford in 1978, celebrating the bicentenary of Voltaire’s death, he laid out his plan for an edition that would break radically with the Lanson tradition: he argued forcefully that the Jore French text was in many respects inferior to the Bowyer French version printed in London and, crucially, that it was this London version that lived on in later editions. He proposed therefore to side-line the Jore edition, and present the two London editions as a bilingual edition, with the English and French on facing pages:

‘Au lecteur du vingtième siècle, on doit la vérité: une édition bilingue. A main gauche, comme sur un clavier, l’anglais de Voltaire; à main droite, le français de Voltaire, non le texte imprimé par Jore, déjà légèrement, mais nettement marqué par la sénescence, mais la rédaction verte, drue, candide, de l’édition de Londres. En somme, les vraies “Lettres anglaises” – et parfois “philosophiques” – en un seul concert visuel.’

This was fighting talk – how I wish we had a podcast of that lecture, and how I wish Rousseau had gone on to produce his edition as planned. When I prepared the first modern edition of the Letters concerning the English nation, I still went along with the Harcourt Brown thesis that Voltaire had begun to write this book in English. But I soon began to have doubts, which I discussed over the years with a good friend, the late Pat Lee: in due course, we each found evidence disproving Harcourt Brown’s central argument, and there is now a scholarly consensus that Voltaire wrote this book in French, and that the English version is in its entirety a translation by John Lockman.

But that does not mean that Lanson was right to dismiss the English version out of hand. They may be a translation, but the Letters concerning the English nation are still, strictly speaking, the first edition of our work. More than that, there is clear evidence that from the start Voltaire intended his Lettres to appear in both French and English (even if he didn’t originally intend the English version to come out first). Lanson’s stirring declaration that the Lettres philosophiques were ‘the first bomb thrown at the Ancien Régime’ (the quote that launched a thousand essay questions…) makes sense in the context of the Third Republic, but is simply not sustainable when we examine the work’s complex international publishing history. Voltaire was clearly writing not just for a French readership, but also for English and European readers more widely. So, in the new Oxford edition, we will include the English version as a text possessing its intrinsic interest as part of the overall European reception of this work.

Where does that leave us with regard to the choice of copy text? Should we stay with Lanson in choosing the Jore edition, the Lettres philosophiques? Or should we follow A.-M. Rousseau’s preference for the Bowyer text, the Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglais? Rousseau was not wrong to say that the Bowyer printing is technically of higher quality than the Jore edition – the Rouen printer was producing a clandestine edition, and no doubt had to work fast. It is also true that because subsequent reworkings of the text mostly took the Bowyer edition as their starting point, the recording of variants to that edition is in practical terms simpler than recording variants to the Jore edition. Only the Jore edition, however, has the 25^th letter, the Anti-Pascal, which was a key part of the book’s polemical impact; and Lanson is right to say that this edition provoked the censorship storm that overwhelmed Voltaire in 1734. Our decision was finely balanced but, in the end, we decided to keep Jore as the base text, not least so as to give the Anti-Pascal its proper prominence.

We resolved, however, to present the variants in a different way from Lanson. The variants in his edition are scrupulously recorded, of course, yet they are frankly hard to interpret, and we need to ask why that is. The censorship of the Lettres philosophiques was savage, and given that Voltaire was legally obliged to abandon the title, he worked to recast the work in a disguised form, under a different name. While individual ‘letters’ largely survive, redesignated as ‘chapters’ from 1739, they are in places substantially rewritten and transformed, and entirely new chapters are added. In other words, we are not dealing here with ‘one’ book and its textual ‘variants’, but rather with a shifting text that continued to evolve throughout Voltaire’s lifetime – so much so, indeed, that Voltaire really questions our received notion of a ‘fixed’ or ‘closed’ text. The challenge for the editor of a print edition is to find a way of taming this shifting entity within the two dimensions of the printed page. So, in our new edition, while we have retained the Lettres philosophiques as base text, we have given full prominence to the other French version, the Lettres écrites de Londres, by including its distinctive paratexts and index in a separate section, and we have created a third section, ‘Mélanges (1739-1775)’, which seeks to track and explain as clearly as we can the various permutations (not variants!) of the letters as they evolve over four decades.

This leaves the dilemma of the title. Our decision to name the overall edition the Lettres sur les Anglais certainly breaks with recent tradition, although the more familiar Lettres philosophiques has only been standard since Lanson imposed it in 1909. Before that, the work was habitually referred to as the Lettres anglaises or Lettres sur les Anglais, titles that Voltaire himself used in his letters. Writing after Voltaire’s death, both Condorcet and Frederick II refer to the Lettres sur les Anglais, and we have followed their example. The great advantage of this title is that it can designate collectively a whole cluster of related printed texts (and the associated manuscript Lettre sur M. Locke). In choosing this title, we wanted to emphasise the fundamentally fluid nature of the Lettres and not to single out any one expression in print.

For all Lanson’s supposedly ‘scientific’ critical approach, his edition of the Lettres philosophiques is a highly politicised work. The Entente cordiale of 1904 was an ambitious diplomatic attempt to strengthen the links between England and France at a moment when war with Germany seemed imminent. For this first exemplary scholarly edition, Lanson’s choice of a work in 1909 that celebrated European Enlightenment and the cultural connections between France and England was hardly fortuitous. And what of the new Oxford edition of the Lettres sur les Anglais, which emphasises Voltaire’s European readership, and that we have been working on in lockdown in 2020 while the UK was discussing severing its ties with the European Union? Whether its editors realise it or not, no critical edition is ever neutral.

– Nicholas Cronk

Lettres sur les Anglais (II) was published in December 2020, an edition by Nicholas Cronk, Nick Treuherz, Nicolas Fréry and Ruggero Sciuto.