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 XVIIIe 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 XVIIIe 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
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Emeritus and University Librarian, Emeritus at Harvard University. He is well known as a leader in the field of cultural history and history of books. Darnton’s works have profoundly changed historians’ understanding of the world of print and communication in eighteenth-century France.On 17 March 2022, he will give a lecture in the Weston Library, Oxford. Please keep an eye on our website for further information.
From 13-22 October 2019, being invited by Zhang Chi (associate professor in the History Department of Zhejiang University, China), Darnton visited Zhejiang University and gave three lectures. Our conversation began with a discussion of Darnton’s recollections of his academic career after nearly half a century of research of the archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel.
Zhang Chi: You’ve been into the history of books ever since the 1970s. I suppose it was better to say that it selected you, than that you chose it. We all are familiar with that story: you got in touch with the library in Neuchâtel to get materials on Brissot, and then there were 50,000 letters. You dug into it the way a journalist would do with a murder case. As an American, why did you choose to study French history? What were things like in the field of the history of books when you first got in?
Robert Darnton:First, I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to address Chinese readers. During my recent visit to Zhejiang University I was greatly impressed not only by the hospitality I received but also by my hosts’ knowledge of Western history. I realized, too, how much I had to learn about the East. I hope this dialogue will contribute at least in a small way to communication between our two sides of the globe. I have grouped the questions together and omitted a few of them to make my answers more coherent.
As I get older, I have an increasing appreciation of contingency. An epidemic unexpectedly breaks out in a remote city, and the world economy collapses. Events like the American invasion of Iraq have disastrous, unintended consequences. Individuals change the course of history – for better (Nelson Mandela) or worse (Donald Trump). History was not supposed to happen that way, according to the Annales School. When I took a deep dive into Annales history in the early 1970s, I absorbed a view of history as long-term structural change uncovered by statistics – ‘histoire sérielle’, as François Furet called it. Furet introduced me to the historians working with him on Livre et société in 1972. Rather than concentrating on great books by famous writers, they used statistical analysis to detect century-long trends. The Enlightenment appeared implicitly as part of a shift away from religious and toward secular subjects across many decades and on a gigantic scale. A new discipline, histoire du livre, promised to reveal general patterns of culture – profound tendencies comparable to what the Annalistes had discovered in studying economic, demographic, and social history.
It was a compelling project, and I thought I had something to contribute to it, because I had been working in the archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel since 1965. I had been doing histoire du livre without knowing it, before the term existed. My research fitted in with that of the Furet group, because it concerned the kind of literature excluded from their sources: illegal books, which I could count and map, showing their diffusion throughout France during the two decades before the Revolution. The history of books has changed enormously since the 1970s, and looking back at it, one factor in my own experience confirms my sense of contingency. I strayed into the archives of the STN by following up a footnote, not to study book history but rather to write a biography of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who published his works in Neuchâtel. When I abandoned the biography and took up the history of books, I chose a fork in the road, and soon there was no going back. Of course, other factors influenced my decision. It was not a matter of chance.
In answering your question, I want to suggest something that I think has shaped many historians’ careers: opportunities that arise unexpectedly, options taken or rejected, unforeseen consequences, and fortuna. It was good fortune to come of age in the United States during the 1950s, when scholarships were plentiful, and to begin a career in the 1960s, when jobs were easily available. In fact, I have been downright lucky. Unlike my father, who fought in World War I and was killed in World War II, I never had to join the army. As to why I as an American should have been interested in France, a question I am often asked, my answer is that France is interesting, inexhaustably interesting, not only in itself (the cafés, the vineyards, the cathedals) but for its relevance to general questions: How do ideas ‘take’ in a social order? What is public opinion? Why do revolutions occur? Those questions bring me to others that you ask.
Zhang Chi: In What is history?, Edward Carr thought it good for history and sociology to learn from each other. While you belonged to another generation, who were concerned with the conversation between history and anthropology. Many years ago, over 20 years if I remember what you said right, you conducted a joint seminar on history and anthropology together with Clifford Geertz at Princeton University. In addition you have prefaced The Interpretation of cultures. Would you like to talk about this seminar? Why would you think history should be in conversation with anthropology? And on the other hand, what would other disciplines, anthropology, for instance, learn from history?
Robert Darnton:Like many historians, I have found inspiration in anthropology, sociology, and other academic disciplines. Yet I would like to point out a misconception about interdisciplinarity. Speaking for myself, at least, I don’t believe in rummaging around in the social sciences in order to come up with tools. With the exceptions of economics and demography, I don’t think social-science methods can be used to engineer historical research. In place of methodological prescriptions, I would invoke two remarks by historians I admire. Marc Bloch said (I am speaking from memory and may get the words slightly wrong): ‘The historian is like the ogre of the fairy tale; where he smells man, he finds his prey.’ And my friend and colleague, the late Carl Schorske, used to say: ‘Man is a meaning-making animal.’
I think the need for meaning is as fundamental for humans as food and drink. By that I don’t mean to imply that ordinary people think like philosophers. As Lévi-Strauss demonstrated, they express ideas and feelings by combining concrete things in their thoughts. Some things in certain cultures are peculiarly good to think with (the French says it better: ‘choses bonnes à penser’). Anthropologists have come up with famous examples – Mary Douglas’s pangolin, Victor Turner’s milk tree, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s witchcraft-substance. The power of such thinkable things consists in the way they are woven into rituals and fit into general patterns of culture. Anthropology can help a historian understand cultural patterns, but it does not provide instruments that will unlock symbolic systems. There is nothing instrumental or mechanical about it. It is exegetic, interpretive, hermeneutical, but it is not arbitrary. Symbolic worlds really exist. In fact, they constitute reality. However, historians, like anthropologists, can get them wrong – and fail to get them adequately right, just as we do when we cannot make ourselves understood in a foreign language. In the seminar I taught with Clifford Geertz, we tried to help the students understand that the interpretation of culture requires rigor, evidence, and conceptual clarity. We had no tool kit to offer, but we were able to orient discussions around a basic problem: what made life meaningful for other people in other times and places.
I fear that I am sounding avuncular, a danger that increases with age. Perhaps it would be better if I gave an example of a sociological concept that I recently found helpful. In The Presentation of Self in everyday life, the sociologist Erving Goffman argues that interpersonal relations can be understood as a form of theatricality. We assume roles and act in conformity with implicit scripts. When I first read the book, I took away from it little more than the notion of role playing, a fairly obvious thought that Goffman works over with a great deal of wit. In rereading it, I understood a more challenging idea: when we assume the roles of audience and actors – for example, in placing an order with a waiter for a meal or in registering with an official to get a driver’s license – we define a situation; we accept a mutual understanding of what is going on. While reading reports of incidents in Paris during the so-called prerevolution of 1787-1788, I found a surprising tendency for contemporary observers to use theatrical metaphors. The Assembly of Notables, for example, was described as a ‘troupe de comédiens’. As I accumulated information, I realized the constant references to acting in roles was a way of construing events – what Goffman calls ‘defining the situation’ or determining ‘what is going on’. As the Parisians understood it, the fundamental situation in 1787-1788 was a struggle against despotism. Yet as historians have traditionally understood it, the prerevolution was an aristocratic revolt. The disparity between the contemporary and the historical views opened up a possibility of rethinking events and of seeing how they figured in the creation of a collective consciousness. That is the subject of the book I am now trying to write.
Zhang Chi: In studying the history of books, you focus on books themselves: how were they made, subscribed, and sold? But you didn’t seem to be concerned with the way people understood them, and the impact such understanding cast on their actions. Is that true? If so, your researches would be different from your friend Roger Chartier’s history of reading. We can know what people read, if there are necessary materials, but it’s hard to know what they think. I think that would be the problem with the history of reading. Would you have divergence with Charter on certain problems? How do you understand the history of reading?
Robert Darnton: I certainly agree that the history of books should include the history of reading, and I have attempted in a few essays to understand the way the French read books two and a half centuries ago. The problem I kept running into was the paucity of sources. Fortunately I found enough evidence to understand how readers responded to the works of Rousseau, but I did not come across documentation about the response to other authors. Of course, we can study marginalia, commonplace books, reviews, and a few other sources. But we do not have enough material to construct a rigorous history of reading – nothing like what we can demonstrate in studying the production and diffusion of books. We are reduced to aperçus. They can be important, suggesting, for example, that silent reading existed in antiquity and that conventions about the spacing of words and punctuation arose during the Middle Ages. I am persuaded by the insights of Roger Chartier and other historians, but I do not think they have produced a history of reading.
I have also followed Roger Chartier in taking inspiration from the works of Michel de Certeau and Richard Hoggarth. They emphasize the active role of readers in construing texts – even to the extent of finding meanings that were not intended by the authors. In this view, readers exert independent power, and readings vary accordingly. However, that raises a problem: if readers behave as poachers, acccording to de Certeau’s famous remark, the poaching, taken as a whole, could look like anarchy, endlessly varied individual experiences, and it would be impossible to perceive general tendencies. One way out of this dilemma could be to fall back on the notion of ‘interpretive communities’ developed by literary theorists such as Stanley Fish. That can be helpful, but how can those communities be detected and described? Where is the evidence of their activities? Like many literary scholars, I have become wary of theory as a way to understand the history of literature.
Despite these difficulties, I think it would be a mistake to ignore the impact of a few important books such as Uncle Tom’s cabin and The Sorrows of young Werther. Rousseau’s works had a profound effect on the reading public in France, even after 1789 when they appealed to émigrés as well as revolutionaries. The Wertherfieber certainly deserves a place in the social history of Germany. In casting about for ways of coping with the difficulties, I have recently been impressed by the insights of the sociologist Gustave Tarde and the historian Benedict Anderson. They relate reading to the formation of collective consciousness. Although, as they acknowledge, individuals read books in different ways, readers as a whole share a sense of participation in the same general activity. Anderson goes so far as to interpret this collective experience as a decisive factor in the development of nationalism in colonial societies. I think that the reading public under the Ancien Régime, varied as it was, developed a general awareness of participating in literary culture. The eighteenth century was a time when writers were celebrated as public personages, when the ‘sacre de l’écrivain’ took hold, and when the intellectual as a social type first emerged. That, too, is the subject of a book I hope to write.
Couronnement de Voltaire sur le Théâtre Français, le 30 mars 1778 (engraving by Charles-Etienne Gaucherl Wikimedia Commons).
Zhang Chi: Compared with the history of books you were concerned with, what kind of breakthrough would the history of communication bring into the understanding and interpretation of history?
Robert Darnton: The connection between reading and collective consciousness has implications for the attempt to understand the relation of the Enlightenment to the Revolution. I think it is clear, for example, that Voltaire mobilized public indignation about abuses in the Church and the judiciary during the Calas Affair. He did not simply ridicule religious orthodoxy as he had done in his early career; he damaged the authority of priests and parlementary magistrates by occupying a higher moral ground. It was the shifting, not just the sapping of moral authority that made the Enlightenment a force. Empowered by that realignment and driven by that ethical energy, the revolutionaries set out to create a new world.
Utopian fervor can spread through the social order like wildfire. Historians have shown how it drove millenarian movements, especially during the Reformation, and I think that something similar took place in the French Revolution. The common people in the Sections of Paris were seized by the energy and vision of radicals who had absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment during difficult careers in the lower ranks of literature and the law. Pierre Manuel, as I have tried to show in The Devil in the Holy Water, typifies Sectional radicals of this kind. Thanks to the power of the press, men of the same stripe – Brissot, Carra, Marat, Danton, Desmoulins – rose to power at the national level. When I first developed this argument, which identified radicalism with the milieu known as Grub Street, I over-stated the case. But I did not mean to reduce revolutionary energy to the frustrations of hack writers. Instead, I intended to demonstrate the importance of obscure intermediaries in the process of ideological mobilization.
A poster of 1793 displaying the Phrygian bonnet.
Non-print media were crucial to this process. Few sans-culottes read books, even if they were literate. They listened to speeches, sang songs, marched in processions, and ate off plates decorated with Phrygian bonnets and crowing roosters. Newspapers and pamphlets belonged to a general stream of sounds and images that swept through Paris. The same was true before 1789. In Poetry and the police I tried to reconstruct the course of that stream in the context of the political crisis of 1749-1750, a time when the Maurepas ministry was overthrown and when contemporaries attributed its downfall to ‘songs’. That observation was a short-hand way of describing the mixed messages that passed through all the media of the time and that actually shaped events. Chamfort made the point with a witticism: ‘France is an absolute monarchy tempered by songs.’ So, yes indeed, I do believe that the history of books should be situated within the study of other media and of communication in general.
Zhang Chi: In The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (2014) French scholar Antoine Lilti asked: ‘Is it possible to write a social history of the Enlightenment? What connections should be drawn between the works, ideas and authors that brought great changes to the intellectual and political landscape in France during the long eighteenth century – commonly called the Enlightenment – and the social changes that occurred during this period?’ What would be your answer to this question? Half a century has passed since you first published The High Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in Pre-revolutionary France. In your opinion, what kind of progress have we made in understanding Enlightenment as a social phenomenon generally? Digitization changed a lot about historical researches. What do you think about its implication?
Robert Darnton: I think Antoine Lilti has partly answered his question by his own work on the salons and the nature of celebrity. Both of his books successfully relate the Enlightenment to social life in Paris during the eighteenth century. Yet they do not constitute a social history of the Enlightenment, a large enterprise that would require broader research. One problem, of course, is how to conceive of the Enlightenment itself. I am not a great believer in definitions, because they tend to reify a subject – that is, to treat it as a thing-in-itself, which, once identified, can be traced through history as if it were a radioactive substance in the blood stream. Antoine Lilti is conscious of this danger and therefore emphasizes the games and worldly amusements of the salons along with the performances in them by the philosophes. He puts Rousseau’s influence into a social context by showing how it was carried on the wave of a new phenomenon, the fascination with celebrities, which included a few philosophes but usually featured non-intellectuals like Cagliostro and the cardinal de Rohan. The more we know about the social context of the Enlightenment, the better we can appreciate it as a historical phenomenon. By situating the Enlightenment socially, however, we may raise the danger of blunting the sharpness of the philosophes’ ideas, of underestimating their cutting edge.
That problem did not seem urgent to the generation that set the course of Enlightenment studies immediately after World War II. Although I myself did not intend to become a historian of the Enlightenment, I got to know the leading scholars of that generation thanks to my tutor at Oxford, Robert Shackleton, the expert on Montesquieu. He introduced me to Franco Venturi, the historian of intellectuals and the reform movement in Italy. Later I became a close friend of Roland Mortier and met other specialists like René Pomeau, Ralph Leigh, and Ira Wade. They did not find the Enlightenment problematic, although they disagreed in describing aspects of it. Its leaders could be identified, its ideas analyzed. It was a field of study, with its own reviews, organizations, and congresses. Above all, as they understood it, it challenged orthodox ideas. It took the Church as its principal target, and it fomented reform of all kinds, social and political. This militant Enlightenment suited a generation that had fought fascism in World War II and opposed totalitarianism during the Cold War.
The current generation has other concerns. Without presuming to characterize it as a whole, I would mention two factors that have shaped its scholarship: globalization and digitization. The attempt to see everything globally can appear as a fad, yet it is an appropriate response to the interconnectedness of the world today. The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which was devoted primarily to the famous philosophes (above all Voltaire) at the time of its founding by Theodore Besterman, now includes 37 national societies, which cover most of the globe. Their members want to investigate Enlightenment thought as it affected people in Rio de Janeiro, Tunis, and (yes!) Beijing – and they want to know how those people developed ideas of their own. One line of inquiry that corresponds to the interests of this generation deals directly with connectedness. Enlightenment scholars have studied correspondence networks, showing how intellectuals communicated through the mail and how their exchanges created a common sense of participation in an international Republic of Letters. The correspondence of Samuel Formey, the secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, is astonishing. He wrote and received dozens of letters every day from nearly every part of the Western world.
That brings me to the second subject, digitization. If Formey’s correspondence were digitized, it would be a map of the Republic of Letters. (There have been attempts to do so, but I think they have foundered.) We now have nearly complete editions of the correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson, and they have been digitized. Taken together, they already constitute such a map; and they have been combined with digital versions of many other writers in a gigantic data base, the Electronic Enlightenment administered from Oxford. The digitization of texts such as ARTFL’s version of Diderot’s Encyclopédie raises endless possibilities for word-searching, context-scrutinizing, and discourse analysis. I won’t mention other examples of big data, which, I gather, are familiar in China. But I would like to conclude by suggesting one direction that might be taken by future scholarship.
The Enlightenment can be understood as a campaign to spread light. Most of its ideas had been developed before the eighteenth century. What gave the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ its peculiar character was the diffusion of ideas, followed up by engagement in putting them into practice. Leaders like Voltaire, Franklin, and Formey consciously manipulated the media of their day. Their strategies could be studied and compared so that we could see them at work, enlisting allies, attacking enemies, empowering reforms, and transforming public opinion. Research of this kind is already taking place and could lead to something like a social history of the Enlightenment. If I were to choose one example of a book that shows the way, I would cite Forging Rousseau: print, commerce and cultural manipulation in the late Enlightenment by the late and much regretted Raymond Birn. It gives a deeply researched and superbly written account of how Rousseau became embedded in the collective imagination of the French.
From a letter by Voltaire to d’Alembert, 28 September 1763 (D11433; Gallica images).
Although I haven’t come close to answering all your questions, I had better stop here at the point where globalization and digitization converge. It should be clear at this point that scholarship cannot be contained within national, disciplinary, or political boundaries. I am sending my replies to you from a place of confinement at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic and at a moment when the destructive forces of nationalism and bigotry seem more threatening than ever. Yet we still hear the call of Voltaire: Ecrasons l’infâme.
Another version of this interview has been published in Historiography Bimonthly (2021, No. 1). Thanks for the authorization from its editors. Especially thanks to Jiao Bing, editor from Historical Research.
Every project in the Complete Works of Voltaire corpus seems to have its own special features that make it not quite fit into the mould of what has gone before. Our team meetings ring to the sounds of editors wailing: ‘But this is different!’ The principles that have served us well over the 50-year duration of the project have had to be agile and adaptable to cover the astonishing range of genres and styles covered by Voltaire.
Histoire de la guerre de 1741, Amsterdam 1755 (left: Bnf, Paris; right: Bodley, Oxford)
Even by the standards of the Voltaire Foundation, though, the Précis du siècle de Louis XV presents a unique challenge because of its complex genesis. Much of the material in the chapters of the Précis which cover the War of the Austrian Succession was first written by Voltaire for his Histoire de la guerre de 1741, a project enthusiastically started when he was appointed as historiographe de France in the 1740s. He never published it himself (though it was published, supposedly unofficially, and at least twice, in 1755), but rewrote and integrated large parts of it in his ambitious universal history, the Essai sur les mœurs. Later, he separated the material on Louis XIV (to become the Siècle de Louis XIV) and Louis XV, and the Précis (which was by this time not really a précis) became a work in its own right in 1769, with later chapters added in the 1770s to take account of, amongst other things, the king’s unexpected death in 1774.
Essay sur l’histoire générale, [Geneva], 1756 (Bodley, Oxford)
This genesis means that the collation and presentation of variants is different from what we usually do. Our usual process goes something like this:
Select a work by Voltaire
Assess the different editions and manuscripts of the work and choose the most appropriate base text (for example, the version that was last overseen by Voltaire, or sometimes the first edition, or else the edition that was most widely read during his lifetime).
Collate significant textual variants from other editions and manuscripts against the base text and present them neatly at the foot of the page.
Sometimes (particularly for example in the theatrical corpus) the variant versions are too divergent from the base text to be presented on the same page, and so in such cases we would print whole scenes or sections as an appendix, with a reference on the relevant page of the base text to direct the reader to where this material could be found.
Louis XV donnant la paix à l’Europe. Laurent Cars after François Lemoyne (BnF, Réserve QB-201 (170, 9)-FT 4). By kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
In the case of the Guerre/Précis project, though, it was clear that we were dealing with not one but (at least) two separate works. The remit of the Précis is much wider than the War of the Austrian Succession, the primary focus of the Guerre. Not to mention what we might call the Essai sur les mœurs stage in the middle, where the titles are dispensed with but the material is reused and moved around to create a narrative that fits into the wider universal history.
We decided early on that the Guerre needed therefore to be treated as a separate text, and, for the first time in a collection of Voltaire’s complete works, it is published in full. This has avoided some horrendous complexities of page layout had we tried to show all the Guerre material as variants to the Précis, as well as the awkwardness of chopping it up into gobbets for appendices. Being able to read the Guerre in its entirety allows the reader a richer understanding of this little-known and underrated text as well as of how it fits into the context of the Précis project. It has also allowed us to separate the manuscripts relating to the composition of the Guerre from those which relate specifically to the Précis, and to present variants from these in the most appropriate context.
However, it has meant that the overlap between the material in the Guerre and that of the Précis has to be shown in other ways. We decided to adopt the method of lightly shading passages in the Guerre to show when there is textual overlap between that text and the later Précis text. This has had the great advantage of showing the reader at a glance the scale of the reuse of this material, as well as allowing us to concentrate in greater detail on the text that is unique to the Guerre. For the shaded sections, readers are referred to the annotation of the Précis, whereas the unique Guerre text is annotated in full in that volume. As Voltaire edited the text as he reused it, we have ignored small differences in phrasing for the purposes of this exercise (see image for example) – but it does sometimes throw into relief small amendments made during the reuse process, for example, deciding to name someone, or amending figures of battlefield casualties etc. in response to new information.
Above: Histoire de la Guerre de 1741, ch.24, l.264-69. Below: Précis du siècle de Louis XV, ch.26, l.78-83.
This decision necessitated another choice: should we shade only the material that was used in our base text of the Précis (Voltaire’s revised 1775 edition, amended by him shortly before his death in anticipation of a new version of his complete works), or should we include all the material that was taken forward from the Guerre, through the Essai and early standalone Précis editions, even if it was subsequently deleted? After discussion with the general editors, it was decided in the end that in the Guerre it was important to distinguish between what Voltaire reused, and what was only ever used in the Guerre. This means that not all the highlighted text will be found in the base text of our edition of the Précis – much of it can be found instead in the variants. The critical thing is that all the shaded text is accounted for and commented on in our edition of the Précis (OCV, vols.29A and 29B).
The Histoire de la guerre de 1741, OCV, vol.29C, publishing in October 2020, completes the three-volume set of the Précis du Siècle de Louis XV, with volumes 29A and 29B published earlier in the year, the general editors being Janet Godden and James Hanrahan.
Many readers picking up Voltaire’s Précis du siècle de Louis XV for the first time might find it all too easy to put down again as not living up to its title. By only a stretched definition is the work a précis; it is not about a siècle; and only in a few places does it focus on Louis XV. But to put it down too quickly would be a mistake. There are many reasons why the Précis – published by the Voltaire Foundation in 3 volumes, the first of which (vol.29A) has just come out – deserves our attention. Here are some of them.
Louis XV donnant la paix à l’Europe (Laurent Cars after François Lemoyne), BnF, Réserve QB-201 (170, 9)-FT 4. By kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Foremost perhaps is the picture of Voltaire in action as a historian of modernity. We know from earlier writings that he thought the study of modern history important for the instruction of future generations. He also thought it essential for the historian to be both accurate and impartial, but then when it came to writing about his own day – events that he had witnessed himself or involved people he knew – he was not always able to put these ideals into practice. The need for impartiality may be behind the detachment with which Voltaire treats Louis XV, but elsewhere he frequently sails too close to the wind, particularly in the polemical chapters at the end of the work. Accuracy he strove for conscientiously, as he had done with the Essai and the Siècle, although sometimes within his own compass of taking the mean position of several authorities without naming any of them. He allows himself to embroider, but if he occasionally seems to invent it is probably in error or where strict accuracy needed to be set against readability, as pointed out by a correspondent of 1768: ‘Vous attachez tant par la magie de votre diction que l’on aime presque mieux s’égarer avec vous que s’instruire pesamment avec d’autres’ (vol.29A, p.140).
The Précis also has a remarkable history as the culmination of Voltaire’s plan, announced in 1742, to write a universal modern history and take it up to his own day. This was the launching pad for the Essai sur les mœurs. The nascent Siècle de Louis XIV, he said in 1745, was destined to ‘[entrer] dans ce grand ouvrage et doit le terminer’ (vol.29A, p.6, n.3). But as the following reign rolled on the distance between an end point of 1714 and continuing the history ‘jusqu’à nos jours’ became too great to be bridged. In 1768, in preparation for the new quarto edition of his Œuvres complètes, Voltaire uncoupled the Siècle from the Essai, reducing the subtitle to ‘jusqu’au règne de Louis XIII’, and using the chapters that carried his history beyond 1714 as the basis of the new Précis du siècle de Louis XV.
Voltaire thus uses the word précis not in the sense of an abridgement of a longer account, as might be expected of a detached published work, but of a summary of what he sees as the essentials of the age in a series of capsules. This enables him to pick and choose his material, pausing to give anecdote and detail in some places, particularly the early years when he himself was in Paris, passing rapidly over the middle years of the reign and dwelling again at length on aspects of the later years that attracted his attention as philosophe. Throughout his style is light, never flippant, and his sometimes provocative leaps, summaries or asides beckon the reader to further research.
As for ‘siècle’, Voltaire had felt from the outset that the achievements of France in the glorious era of the roi soleil should be defined not in terms of a reign, but as an ‘age’ or epoch. This is the sense in which the word is used again of the reign of Louis XV, although the king did not dominate his own reign and was noteworthy only in the wrong ways. For most of the book Louis XV himself stands silently to one side, but the events portrayed seem none the worse for that, highlighting the difference between his ‘siècle’ and that of his great-grandfather.
In 1768 Voltaire brings the Précis up to date with further chapters on more recent matters, and extends the themes of some of these into the self-contained Histoire du parlement de Paris. He closes the resulting gap between the early and later years of the reign of Louis XV by bringing in a précis in the more usual sense of the word. This was the first authorised appearance, albeit in shortened form, of Voltaire’s Histoire de la guerre de 1741, undertaken in 1745 in his capacity of historiographe du roi, as an account of the ‘campagnes du roi’ in Flanders of 1744 and 1745. These campaigns covered years that showed the king at his best and France as victorious; they were soon extended both backwards and forwards to take in the whole war, but that is another story, to be read with the full text in volume 29C. Circumstances conspired against Voltaire’s intention to publish the Guerre de 1741 until he was settled in Geneva, by which time France was involved in another war and any thirst for details of the War of the Austrian Succession had long evaporated. By the mid 1760s, therefore, the Guerre was a work in search of a home, and the incipient Précis a work with a beginning and potential end but no middle. The solution was obvious.
Having difficulty keeping up? Unsurprising – the complexities defeated the Kehl editors as well as Beuchot and Moland, who omitted the original complete Guerre entirely. The Introduction in vol.29A of this edition analyses the sequence of the composition of both texts and the eventual assembly of the whole in 1768.
But Voltaire was unable to call it a day. Another edition of his complete works in 1775 saw him taking up his pen once more at the age of eighty to record the death of the king, who in the course of nature – and perhaps Voltaire’s original conception of this work – would have been expected to outlive Voltaire. And Voltaire was then spurred on to review the whole. Annotations preserved in a copy of the 1775 edition now in St Petersburg show the Précis to be among the most heavily corrected texts under revision at the time of Voltaire’s death, truly taking his modern history ‘jusqu’à nos jours’. Looking at the years since 1742 and the water that had flowed beneath Voltaire’s many bridges since then, his readers can only respond, Chapeau!
How does a scholarly book get started? In the majority of cases it is bound with the author or editor’s passion and deep-rooted (and often inexplicable) connection with his or her subject matter. For me, Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820 began nearly ten years ago, when I read Kathryn Shevelow’s eminently readable book For the love of animals, about the growth of the animal welfare movement in the eighteenth century. Our relationship with animals never ceases to fascinate, as we see from the Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition ‘Making nature: how we see animals’, and animal studies has recently flourished in the academic mainstream. Like Shevelow’s book, it crosses the boundaries between specialised academic study and deeply felt human experience.
My own beginning with this subject, though, occurred almost in infancy. An innate attraction to animals, these others with whom we co-exist on this planet, is shared by almost all small children and all human cultures in one way or another, and is represented throughout human history. And as we see in very small children, in this oldest relationship of the human species we still find a deep connection and resonance. In bringing together and editing this book, it was wonderfully liberating to be able to combine a lifelong passionate interest in animals with my own professional field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.
1650-1820 – the timeframe we cover in our study – is the period associated both with the growth of experimental science and the horrors of vivisection, and with the rise of modern humanitarianism. While the defence of animal rights itself goes back to classical times, in the eighteenth century it was directly linked to a growing awareness of universal human rights and a new definition of humanity based on the ability to feel rather than in the primacy of reason. Together with the abolitionist and feminist movements of the later eighteenth century, animal welfare came to resemble its modern self, with legislation first enacted in 1820.
But in this book we aim to explore more deeply the human relationship with animals in the long eighteenth century, in many different forms of expression. As shown by the different essays in this volume, this ancient relationship challenges not only the arbitrary divisions of Western cultural history (classicism and romanticism, for example), and not only disciplinary boundaries between poetry and science, art and animal husbandry, fiction and natural history, but also the basic assumptions of human self-perception, in which we do not see animals as objects of our ‘objective’ study, but rather as beings with whom we share a space and who demand a mutual response. A major thread of this book, then, is the re-evaluation of sentiment and sensibility, terms that in the eighteenth century referred to the primacy of emotion, and which were not solely the prerogative of humans. Through the lens of eighteenth-century European culture, contributors to this volume show how the animal presence, whether real or imagined, forces a different reading not only of texts but also of society: how humans are changed, and how we the readers are changed, in our encounters with the non-human other, in history, art, literature, natural science and economics. More deeply, we are reminded of the power and antiquity of this relationship.
There are few paradigms more tightly connected with the Scottish Enlightenment than the four stages theory. Yet it arguably remains one of the least understood.
James Tassie, Medallion of John Millar (1767). Courtesy of the University of Glasgow Archive Services, University collection, GB 248 UP3/26/1.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, a whole host of famous Scottish thinkers – Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and John Millar – attempted to explain a range of social phenomena according to a single, universal narrative of the history of progress. The spirit of the paradigm was that the fundamental distinguishing components of societies lay not in accidents of climate, religion or race, but rather in the social, psychological, legal and cultural effects of the history of property and sustenance relations. While French thinkers such as Anne Robert Jacques Turgot used three stages to achieve similar analyses, the Scots preferred four:
Hunting, where property only extended to what one could carry on one person (savagery),
Pastoralism, where shepherding witnessed the development of animal property (barbarism),
Agriculture, where society became settled and landed property became pivotal in the production of sustenance (civilisation),
Commercial society, defined by contemporary Europe.
The paradigm has, for good reason, been widely identified as a pioneering step in the development of various disciplines of the modern social sciences. At the same time, in taking the commercial society of eighteenth-century Britain as the pinnacle of the history of liberty, postcolonial scholars have, with validity, critiqued it as a blatant example of Eurocentric world historical narration.
John Millar, the protégé of Adam Smith and Regius professor of civil law at the University of Glasgow for nearly four decades at the end of the eighteenth century, is often cited as the most systematic articulator of the four stages theory. Attention has been paid particularly to his reflections on the history of family and gender, which constitute the great bulk of his stadial theory-infused magnus opus, the Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.
I began research for my book John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: family life and world history with the intention of revealing how Millar managed his oft-celebrated cohesion. In fact, I was quickly confronted with lacunae, gaps and contradictions with Millar’s stadial analysis. Digging deeper, I realised that these arose from his difficulties in overcoming a complex intellectual web of competing analytical frameworks using evidence and existing scholarship that defied any easy organisation. Moreover, it became clear that his intention was much less to innovate any coherent science of stage-based analysis than to set out his convictions about politics, the family and the nature of authority.
Too often, Millar’s lack of full coherence in his use of stadial analysis has been attributed to intellectual underperformance. In my book, I take a different approach, viewing Millar as a guide to the history of knowledge underpinning the pursuit of stadial history, with a particular focus on gender and the family. Millar used the stadial model as only one of several intersecting paradigms. His deployment and innovation of classic natural law structures, such as the history of household authority relations and the tripartite division of marriage struggle, reveals the importance of his professional setting as a professor of law in Glasgow. Additionally, in his retention of religion as a critical means for explaining differences in marriage practices, we see that even Millar had doubts about stadial analysis as a fully convincing alternative to paradigms such as sacred history.
The deeper we probe into Miller’s complex work, the more we discover his Enlightenment spirit of speculative curiosity. His legacy to modern disciplines of sociology and anthropology [1] lies not so much in the rigidity of his conviction in any single analytical framework, but rather his thirst for cross-cultural comparison and analysis. His extended discussion of topics ranging from matriarchal familial forms and the Amazon legend to national character and polygamy was not intended to tie up loose threads in stadial analysis, but rather to be an ambitious attempt at historicising all dimensions of authority.
– Nicholas B. Miller, University of Lisbon
[1] William Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735-1801: his life and thought and his contributions to sociological analysis (Cambridge, 1960).
My thesis aims to link the experiences, influences and ideas gained from Jean-Paul Marat’s pre-revolutionary career as a doctor, scientist and political theorist to an analysis of the content, strategy and reception of his journalism during the first year of the French Revolution. This was a time when Marat reinvented himself, first as a pamphleteer reaching out to ‘advise’ the new parliamentary elite, and then, when that failed, as a popular journalist reaching out to ‘educate’ a much broader audience with the benefit of observations, conclusions and experiences accrued from earlier political and legal publications and his 10-year stay in England from 1765 to 1776.
Limbering up on the steps of the book-shaped TGB (“Très Grande Bibliothèque”) before a long session underground
I am very grateful to the Voltaire Foundation and BSECS for a generous research grant that allowed me to complete vital research Paris during July and August 2016, including accessing reports of legal actions and denunciations in the national, judicial and police archives. These included not only seizures of Marat’s manuscripts and correspondance – the only traces that survive of his personal papers and working methods – but also a unique collection of hand-corrected copies of his Ami du peuple newspaper intended for a later collected edition, and a comprehensive collection of contemporary pamphlets revealing early signs of engagement, often hostile, from other pamphleteers. The correspondance in particular, although a mere snapshot, is invaluable for attempting to trace the extent, and social standing, of his network of subscribers across France.
The Fuksas-designed Pierrefitte Archives currently houses around 180 km of records for the French state since 1789
There is an ongoing problem in the French Revolutionary historiography in understanding the extent of Marat’s contribution to the formation of public opinion in his role as a radical journalist. There is much disagreement between historians over his consistency, his strategy, his style, and even his sanity. However, a closer reading of his work reveals a far more coherent social and political vision, stretching back over twenty years, than previously credited, which allowed Marat to rapidly play an important role during the first year of the Revolution. In particular, the thesis will emphasize how, after switching his focus to journalism in September 1789, Marat’s subsequent persecution by the revolutionary authorities for his relentless critiques of leading figures and institutions – especially former ancien regime legal ones – helped to crystallize his transformation into the ‘Ami du peuple’ persona, a powerful symbol of freedom of expression and resistance to oppression. It will argue that this was largely the result of Marat’s strategy of continually pushing at the boundaries of press freedom and publicizing the consequences, a lesson inspired by the examples of the notorious polemicist Junius and raucous popular support for the politician-journalist John Wilkes, which he had witnessed during his earlier stay in England.
Sustained immersion in the Paris libraries and archives over a seven-week period helped me to build a much richer, composite picture of the nascent revolutionary environment in which Marat was operating, than would otherwise have been possible. As did the extended opportunity to visit and explore many of the places where Marat and his colleagues lived, worked and, occasionally were put on trial, adding spatial awareness and visual texture to an otherwise two-dimensional textual dimension.
Voltaire began work on his comedy in a writing frenzy in winter 1739-40 (‘Je n’ai jamais été si inspiré de mes dieux, ou si possédé de mes démons’, January 1740) but then tinkered with it for seven and a half years; Sade, on the contrary, carefully planned his novel for two and a half years, before writing it up in thirty-seven days in late 1785. Voltaire struggled to bring his comedy, which is based on William Wycherley’s often obscene The Plain Dealer (1676), into line with French taste and decorum, whereas Sade brazenly increases the abject sexual violence from page to page, even throwing in a couple of ‘supplices en supplément’ for good measure. A sense as to how these works differ might be gleaned from looking at a point of overlap, namely the presence of cross-dressing characters. And if Adam Phillips is right to suggest that ‘Two’s company, but three’s a couple’, then let’s bring in Casanova who joins our two friends in being recognized as an Enlightenment philosopher.
Adine dressed as a Greek boy in La Prude, in Collection complète des œuvres de M. de Voltaire, 1768.
There is plenty of pleasure in La Prude – unfortunately most of it happens off stage. The epicurean Madame Burlet is forever zipping from dinners to plays, eating, drinking and singing, and she appears to be a shopaholic (‘Amas nouveaux de boîtes, de rubans, / Magots de Saxe, et riches bagatelles’), but we never see any of this. The on-stage presence of Adine, dressed as Greek boy – apparently it’s the best way to keep lecherous Turkish pashas and sailors at bay – does stimulate desire in the eponymous prude Dorfise, but that desire is portrayed as ridiculous. Adine is a non-threatening, rather wimpy ephebe, and Dorfise is not only mocked for falling for her, but is also dehumanised in her final utterance, the nonsensical cry ‘Ah!’ Part of the audience’s satisfaction derives from seeing a character humiliated when the transvestite’s true identity is exposed.
Not so with Sade. On day 18 of the 120 Days, Madame Duclos tells of a man who ‘ne voulait du féminin que l’habit, mais, dans le fait, il fallait que ce fût un homme, et, pour m’expliquer mieux, c’était par un homme habillé en femme que le paillard voulait être fessé.’ There is no doubt as to the youth’s real identity, and his obvious drag is central to the scenario: it’s precisely in the old lecher’s transgression of having sex with this ‘masculine fouetteuse’, and in exposing that transgression to the employees of the brothel, that he finds his pleasure. The reader’s satisfaction comes from the narrator keeping both masculine and feminine elements of the youth’s persona visible, and with the older man shrugging off all judgment of his idiosyncratic behaviour: ‘Je voulus travailler à sa conversion, je l’assurai que j’avais des filles charmantes qui le fouetteraient tout aussi bien: il ne voulut seulement pas les regarder.’
Giacomo Casanova, by his brother Francisco Giuseppe Casanova, 1750-1755
Casanova tells of an encounter in an auberge in Cesena. Disturbed by a ruckus, he goes to the adjoining room where he sees poking out from under the bedclothes ‘une tête échevelée riante, fraîche, et séduisante qui ne me laisse pas douter de son sexe, malgré que sa coiffure fût d’homme’. This is Henriette, and the adventurer mentions no frisson deriving from her cross-dressing – his desire is provoked solely by the girl’s femininity. Her drag does, however, stimulate pleasure of another kind: ‘Cette fille n’avait que l’habit d’homme qui la couvrait, pas la moindre nippe de femme; pas seulement une chemise. Elle en changeait avec celles qui appartenaient à son ami. Cela me semblait nouveau et énigmatique.’ If exposure is central to cross-dressing in Voltaire and Sade, in Casanova the initial exposure gives way to mystery and reflection. Voltaire and Sade want to solve problems, Casanova revels in them.
Bonne rentrée! This September marks a milestone for the OCV team as we publish the final chapters of our critical edition of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV (OCV, vol.13D), in which Voltaire explores the cultural history of the reign, including chapters on religious conflict and sectarianism as well as on achievements in the scientific, artistic and literary spheres. This volume completes the critical edition of the narrative of this monumental work, representing over 1500 pages of Voltaire’s text and editorial notes. The general editor, Diego Venturino, has meticulously pieced together Voltaire’s sources and analysed the context in which he worked and the way he sifted evidence to provide a revealing and comprehensive account of Voltaire’s historical method. We’re very happy with how handsome they look on our shelf, as well as proud of the diligence and hard work that has gone into making them just as magnificent on the inside.
We were also really pleased this summer to launch an update to our explorer’s guide to Louis XIV. We wanted to provide a resource which would enable the scholarly research in the books to reach a wider audience, as well as giving some of the background to one of the most remarkable monarchs in European history. When the BBC series Versailles hit our screens earlier in the summer, we thought it would be interesting to explore some of the characters and events featured in the series from the viewpoint, not so much of ‘were they really like that?’ but ‘what did Voltaire have to say about them?’. It’s striking how many of the eye-catching incidents can be traced back to him, and we’ve enjoyed exploring how much further some of the hints provided by Voltaire and other historians have been stretched by the mischievous programme-makers.
As joint ‘secretaries’ of the edition, both working part-time and fitting in family commitments around our work on Voltaire, Pippa Faucheux and I have been particularly pleased that we’ve been able to keep the continuity over the summer, working closely with our valued collaborators, including general editor Professor Venturino and our partners at the Palace of Versailles, as well as our indexer, typesetters and printers in the UK. We’re now excited about moving on to get to grips with the fascinating ‘Catalogue des écrivains’, the Who’s Who of Louis XIV’s world that launches the reader into the narrative of the Siècle, for publication in spring 2017 (OCV, vol.12).
At the beginning of his 1791 Les Ruines, Constantin-François de Volney describes himself sitting amidst the ruins of Palmyra, on the edge of the Syrian desert. As his gaze shifts back and forth between the ancient monuments and the open horizon, he sinks into a profound reverie. It is the beginning of a long meditation on the principles that govern the rise and fall of civilizations.
A thriving cosmopolitan city in which the Persian and Greco-Roman worlds merged in complex ways, Palmyra was at its height between the first and second centuries AD. Its ruins, a destination for countless European travellers from the seventeenth century onward, bore witness to its greatness. Volney, like many others before him, was fascinated and at the same time dismayed by the sight. For him the ruins of Palmyra evoked not only the glorious past of an ancient Empire, but also a possible future for the great Western civilizations. They echoed the fragility itself of human society, and their shattered architecture was the material embodiment of the incessant cycles of history. By observing the rubble of the past, visitors were also stimulated to reflect on the causes that led a people to ruination. The knowledge of ruins past – for Volney – could help nations avert the eventual collapse of civilization.
Figure 5: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of the subterranean foundations of the Mausoleum built by the Emperor Hadrian, Le Antichità romane (1756), vol.4, pl.9. High Def image also available to view on line.
The ruins of Palmyra are today under attack. As the ancient city has become a battlefield in the war between the Syrian regime and ISIS, we have seen its architectural heritage disappear – razed to the ground with explosives. The latest to fall, after the temples of Baalshamin and of Bel, was the 2000-year-old Arch of Triumph. The eighteenth-century etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose depictions of ruined landscapes are still so eloquent, was convinced that ruins had a voice and that they would continue to speak to our imaginations over the centuries. The ruins of Palmyra are powerful, stirring symbols and the fighters of ISIS must fear their collective voice if they are now trying to silence it once and for all. There is a sense of both disbelief and horror that seizes us at the thought of a piece of our collective history being ruthlessly destroyed.
In my book Ruins past: modernity in Italy, 1744-1836 I discuss the layered symbolism of ruins in Italy during its transition to modernity between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I explore how the multiple meanings assumed by ruins are inextricable from the way we think about history, the relationship between past, present, and future, and categories such as progress and change. Ruins are never neutral symbols. If their destruction is an act of war, it is one aimed at rewriting history.
Figure 6: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View showing a part of the foundations of the Theater of Marcellus, Le Antichità romane (1756), vol.4, pl.32. HD image.
As George Orwell suggested, far more terrible than the power that desires to control the future is one that attempts to dominate the past as well [1]. By erasing ruins, historical memory is destroyed. There is no more effective way of delegitimizing the present in order to lay the ground for a new regime and its new historical narrative. While the preservation (and reinvention) of its ancient ruins was both a poetic and a political act in Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Syria today it is an imperative of salvation.
There is some hope on the horizon. In October 2015, a group of activists started #NEWPALMYRA, an online archive of 3-D models that reproduce Palmyra’s monuments with the aim of “rebuilding” the city. The Oxford Institute of Digital Archaeology has also launched the Million Image Database project, whose goal is to construct a 3-D photographic record of objects from endangered sites across the Middle East and North Africa, including Palmyra. To save the ruins of the past is an act of resistance crucial to saving the future.
– Sabrina Ferri
Sabrina Ferri, Ruins past: modernity in Italy, 1744-1836. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, December 2015. ISBN 978-0-7294-1171-4.
Voltaire Foundation 
