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

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[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).

Voltaire, the Lettres sur les Anglais, and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism

Fougeret de Monbron, Le Cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde, title page of the 1753 edition (BnF).

‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means’: so spoke Prime Minister Theresa May, addressing her party faithful at a conference in 2016, soon after the Brexit referendum. It was Diogenes the Cynic, two and a half millennia ago, who first styled himself a kosmou polites, a citizen of the world, and this Greek expression survives in many modern European languages. The term cosmopolite enters the French language in the sixteenth century, and still today it is often used, in a weak sense, to describe someone who is simply well travelled. Fougeret de Monbron, for example, in a book entitled Le Cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde (1750), wrote about his travels in Europe: ‘L’univers est une espèce de livre dont on n’a lu que la première page quand on n’a vu que son pays.’

In the eighteenth century the term acquired greater ideological heft. The ethos of cosmopolitisme (a term first attested in the first half of the eighteenth century) characterises a mindset that was common to the European élite of the Enlightenment. Educated men and women of this period experienced a feeling of kinship with a broader humanity, that was separate from, and not in contradiction with, the patriotism they felt for their own countries. This cosmopolitan ethos is evident in a letter Voltaire wrote to César de Missy, then resident in London (D2648, 1 September 1742): ‘Je ne sais si le pays qui est devenu le vôtre est l’ennemi de celui que le hasard de la naissance a fait le mien, mais je sais bien que les esprits qui pensent comme vous sont de mon pays, et sont mes vrais amis.’

In his essay ‘Of goodness and goodness of nature’, Francis Bacon famously wrote that ‘if a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows that he is a citizen of the world.’ In this perspective, cosmopolitanism is closely linked with the idea of civility. As Keith Thomas writes, in his recent book In Pursuit of Civility (2018): ‘The friendly reception of foreign visitors had been an essential test of civility since classical times. In the early modern period, it became increasingly important, with the growth of travel, the migration of religious refugees and the vast expansion of international trade.’

I came to reflect on this question recently when I was writing the introduction to the Lettres sur les Anglais for the Complete works of Voltaire. In the opening sentence of the book (in its French-language version), the narrator – who sounds suspiciously like Voltaire – presents himself to the reader as an ‘homme raisonnable’, curious to learn more about the Quakers. He calls on an eminent Quaker who has retired to a country house on the edge of London, and there follows a scene of high comedy. The Frenchman, who bows and waves his hat in deferential mode, is utterly confounded by the plainly dressed Quaker who refuses to bow and scrape, and addresses his French visitor with the familiar ‘thou’ (I quote here the original English-language version of the text): ‘He did not uncover himself when I appeared, and advanced towards me without once stooping his body; but there appeared more politeness in the open, human air of his countenance, than in the custom of drawing one leg behind the other, and taking that from the head, which is made to cover it. Friend, he says to me, I perceive thou art a stranger…’

In the scene that follows, the French visitor is received with sincere hospitality, even though he finds it difficult at first to unlearn his French social manners: ‘I still continued to make some very unseasonable ceremonies, it not being easy to disengage one’s self at once from habits we have long been used to.’ After eating together, the two men fall into a discussion of religion. The Catholic visitor explains to his Quaker host that to be considered a true Christian he would need to be baptised, to which the Quaker objects that baptism is a ceremony inherited from Judaism, and that Christ himself never baptised his followers. The French narrator, who had begun by declaring his reasonableness, finds that he has no answer to the Quaker on this point of doctrine, but nor can he admit that he has lost the argument. ‘I had more sense than to contest with him, since there is no possibility of convincing an enthusiast’, he declares pompously, before quickly changing the subject.

The opening letter of the Lettres sur les Anglais has attracted much commentary. To begin with, it places the theme of religion front and centre, using a seemingly light and amusing dialogue to conduct what is in fact a brief but sophisticated consideration of the nature and foundation of Christian belief. In suggesting that different Christian traditions pick and choose between different parts of the Bible, Voltaire clearly hints at the superiority of a deistic form of belief that transcends the particular ceremonies of any one sect: ‘But art thou circumcised, added he [the Quaker]? I have not the honour to be so, says I. Well, friend, continues the Quaker, thou art a Christian without being circumcised, and I am one without being baptised.’

The deist undercurrent of this opening encounter between Catholic and Quaker is self-evident, but in other respects this first letter poses challenges to the reader. At the start, we are naturally drawn into complicity with the self-styled reasonable narrator, faced as he is by the comic and eccentric figure of the Quaker who steadfastly refuses to remove his beaver fur hat. But as their discussion evolves, we come increasingly to admire the Quaker’s solid virtues, and the ‘reasonable’ narrator loses our confidence as he loses the argument with the Quaker. Our sympathy for the two actors in this scene is further complicated by an awareness that it might loosely be based on reality: the real-life Voltaire, when he was in London, did indeed pay a visit to a prominent Quaker, Andrew Pitt, who lived outside London, in Hampstead; as for the argument about the Biblical arguments in favour of baptism, Voltaire himself did engage in just such an argument in London, as is recounted by the young Quaker Edward Higginson who taught Voltaire English. This opening letter is a piece of fiction, of course, but it is a fiction inspired by Voltaire’s lived experience in London in the 1720s.

Voltaire’s magisterial use of irony contributes to – while also complicating – our pleasure in reading this opening letter. Erich Auerbach wrote some memorable pages on what he called Voltaire’s ‘searchlight technique’, his use of defamiliarisation (where bowing becomes ‘the custom of drawing one leg behind the other’) to make us rethink apparently familiar concepts. The comic defamiliarisation of acts of social intercourse such as bowing or raising a hat seems harmless and innocent enough; but in Voltaire’s hands the technique is treacherous, as he then immediately applies it to a discussion of religious ritual (baptism, circumcision). The deconstruction of these Christian practices is anything but harmless or innocent, and the unwitting readers who thought they were laughing at an eccentric English Quaker or an overly ceremonious French Catholic suddenly find themselves complicit in mocking Christian doctrine.

For years we have been taught to read Voltaire’s Lettres sur les Anglais as a book ‘about the English’, but it is not only that, and it is perhaps not even mainly that. The opening juxtaposition of the Ancien Régime Catholic and the sober English Quaker is an object lesson in cultural difference, but it is also a demonstration of how those differences may be overcome: even while Voltaire has fun in pointing out what divides them, he also reminds us of what they have fundamentally in common: they share a meal together, in mutual respect and civility and, despite everything, they both identify as Christians. This lesson in tolerant understanding and exchange is a lesson for Voltaire’s readers, a lesson in how to read the book that they are just beginning, and more generally a lesson in how to lead their Enlightened lives. Civility and the ethic of cosmopolitanism are at the heart of this opening letter, and it is surely no coincidence that the word cosmopolitisme enters the French language at round about the time of the publication of the Lettres sur les Anglais.

Title page of Letters concerning the English nation (London, 1733).

Our new edition of the Lettres sur les Anglais reveals this text in a fresh light by emphasising also the European, we might say cosmopolitan, nature of its publication. For most of the twentieth century, following Lanson’s pioneering edition of the Lettres philosophiques in 1909, the Lettres were seen as a book about England, written for the French. This interpretation failed to take account of the crucial fact that an English translation of the work, Letters concerning the English nation, appeared in London in 1733, with Voltaire’s full knowledge, before the French language editions, published in London, Rouen and Paris in 1734. The new Oxford edition of the Lettres is the first to include the English text and to accord it its due importance. It is now clear that Voltaire wrote this text also for an Anglophone readership, and the Letters were a best-seller in Britain and Ireland throughout the eighteenth century. In its French-language version, this book was published in London as well as in France, and was then reprinted in the Low Countries and in Germany. Much attention has been paid to the high-profile censorship of the Lettres philosophiques in France in 1734 (and of course, censorship was always good for sales); far less attention has been paid to the fact that this book was quickly reprinted and read across Europe. With his Lettres sur les Anglais, Voltaire wrote a book designed for a European élite, the first cosmopolitan classic of the Enlightenment.

Aaron Hill (National Portrait Gallery).

In his Reith Lectures of 2016, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah talked about the ways in which people’s thinking about religion, nation, race and culture very often reflects misunderstandings about notions of identity: ‘If cosmopolitanism involves a simple recognition that our lives are interrelated in ways that transcend boundaries and that our human concerns must, too, it has brute reality on its side.’ That is an idea that the Enlightenment well understood and that Voltaire explores memorably in the Lettres sur les Anglais.

Aaron Hill, The Tragedy of Zara, 2nd ed. (London, 1736) (image from Biblio.com).

Voltaire’s cosmopolitan ambitions were certainly recognised in his lifetime, for example by Aaron Hill, the poet and dramatist who ran the Theatre Royal in London. He is remembered, among other things, as the author of Zara, an English rewriting of Zaïre, and by far the most successful English-language version of any Voltaire play in the eighteenth century. When Zara was first performed in London, Hill wrote to Voltaire as follows (D1082, 3 June 1736):

‘I found you born for no one country, by the embracing wideness of your sentiments; for, since you think for all mankind, all ages, and all languages, will claim the merit of your genius. Whatever narrowness there is in poets, there is none in poetry, at least, your poetry… What paints all manners, should delight all countries.’

– Nicholas Cronk

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.

 

Artifex quidam nomine Newton

Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium, t.1, page de titre. (Google Books)

Dans la première réédition des Lettres philosophiques parue en 1739, Voltaire a remplacé la dernière phrase de la XVI^e Lettre ‘Sur l’optique de M. Newton’ par les lignes suivantes: ‘Il était encore peu connu en Europe quand il fit cette découverte. J’ai vu un petit livre composé environ ce temps-là dans lequel, en parlant du télescope de Newton, on le prend pour un lunetier: Artifex quidam Anglus nomine Newton. La renommée l’a bien vengé depuis.’[1]

Gustave Lanson avait cherché en vain la source du syntagme latin que Voltaire répétera à chaque nouvelle édition jusqu’en 1756. Nous savons désormais qu’il l’a déniché dans l’ouvrage très technique d’un savant prémontré (et non jésuite, comme il l’écrira en 1756[2]), le bavarois Johann Zahn (1641-1707), publié à Würzburg en trois tomes en 1685-1686 sous le titre Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium. Dans cette nouvelle fin de la XVI^e Lettre, Voltaire observe avec étonnement que la renommée de Newton, déjà bien établie en Angleterre grâce à son télescope et ses recherches sur la lumière publiées en 1672 et 1675, était encore inexistante sur le continent au moment où Zahn publia son ‘petit livre’ – un in-quarto de 181 pages tout de même. Alors que Voltaire a consacré, dans la première version de 1734, pas moins de trois lettres aux grandes découvertes de Newton, mentionnant comme en passant son invention du télescope à réflexion, cette invention acquiert de plus en plus d’importance dans les versions ultérieures grâce à l’immortelle formule du prémontré bavarois: Anglus quidam artifex Newtonus (Oculus artificialis, t.3, p.151).

Réplique du télescope que Newton présenta à la Royal Society en 1672. (Wikimedia Commons, © Andrew Dunn)

De 1739 à 1756, ce syntagme latin revient avec insistance, mais la signification symbolique dont il est chargé change selon le contexte. En 1739, Voltaire peut se flatter d’avoir contribué à la renommée dont Newton commence à jouir sur le continent, mais un patriotisme étroit et borné continue de rejeter les découvertes du savant anglais pour des raisons mesquines de fierté nationale. Attaqué par le cartésien Banières d’être mauvais Français, Voltaire répond dans l’édition de 1742 que la renommée du ‘lunetier’ n’est plus à faire.

En 1751, Newton a définitivement gagné la partie mais l’affrontement entre les philosophes et leurs adversaires a commencé. Ceux-ci sont loin de confondre Newton avec un lunetier, mais lui intentent un procès en athéisme. Au moment où paraît le Discours préliminaire de D’Alembert, il ne s’agit plus de défendre Descartes contre Newton ni la France contre l’Angleterre, mais la nouvelle philosophie, dont les hérauts s’appellent Newton, Locke, Clarke et Leibniz.

En 1756, Voltaire modifie les lettres sur Newton une dernière fois, et de façon radicale: toute la partie scientifique est supprimée. Face au triomphe de Newton en France, il estime probablement que ses explications ne font plus le poids. Qui plus est, Voltaire a commencé à prendre ses distances avec la ‘métaphysique’ de Newton, attitude qui s’accentuera dans les années qui vont suivre.[3] Dans un court morceau intitulé sobrement ‘De Newton’, les trois découvertes du savant anglais sont ramassées dans un court paragraphe, puis Voltaire passe à l’invention du télescope à réflexion, à laquelle il accorde deux fois plus de place qu’au calcul infinitésimal, à l’attraction et à la lumière.

Ce qui reste, c’est l’ouvrier Newton, le faiseur de lunettes, artifex quidam. Voltaire avait le don de repérer et d’exploiter le détail qui fait mouche: après la pomme et le prisme, l’artifex quidam du prémontré bavarois Zahn s’est taillé une place de choix dans l’imaginaire scientifique voltairien.[4]

– Gerhardt Stenger

[1] Lettres philosophiques, suivies des Derniers écrits sur Dieu, éd. Gerhardt Stenger (Paris, 2006), p.170, var. b.

[2] Ibid., p.293.

[3] Voir l’introduction à notre édition des Lettres philosophiques, p.50-57.

[4] Voir notre article ‘Artifex quidam nomine Newton: à propos de la XVI^e Lettre philosophique de Voltaire’ à paraître dans la Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France en novembre 2020.

 

L’âme de Voltaire dans tous ses états: l’édition critique de la version clandestine de la Lettre sur Locke

John Locke, par Godfrey Kneller (1697).

En 1733, la première version de la Lettre sur Locke est écartée par Voltaire des Lettres sur les Anglais à cause de ses audaces quasi-matérialistes qui risquent d’entraîner la censure de l’ensemble du recueil. Une nouvelle version sensiblement remaniée et édulcorée est finalement publiée en tant que lettre 13 de l’ouvrage. Mais Voltaire reprend la version d’origine en 1736 et développe la comparaison entre l’homme et l’animal, en allant bien au-delà des allusions prudentes de Locke dans son Essai sur l’entendement humain (1690): de la possibilité d’une “matière pensante”, le pas est glissant vers l’affirmation d’un lien essentiel entre l’“organisation” des corps et leurs propriétés cognitives. La Lettre lui échappe alors et connaît une circulation manuscrite et de nombreuses éditions au cours du dix-huitième siècle.

Paris, BnF (Arsenal): Ms 2557.

Notre édition critique a exigé une véritable enquête de détective selon plusieurs pistes ouvertes par les “nouvelles à la main” qui annoncent au mois de juin 1736 la diffusion d’une version inédite de la Lettre sur Locke. Toutes ces pistes ont conduit à un recueil de manuscrits clandestins conservé à l’Arsenal, qui s’est révélé être la source de toutes les copies manuscrites connues et des très nombreuses éditions publiées au cours du dix-huitième siècle. Chemin faisant, il s’agissait de démasquer les ennemis de Voltaire et leurs complices – une bande de “usual suspects” – qui ont œuvré à la diffusion de la Lettre et d’autres écrits audacieux de Voltaire. On découvre ainsi au bout de l’enquête une stratégie concertée de comploteurs qui exploitent un aspect des compositions de Voltaire qui le rend vulnérable: son irréligion. Voltaire a beau tempêter, multipliant les dénégations et les désaveux; il porte plainte, il fait lancer des enquêtes, des perquisitions, des saisies, des arrestations et des interrogatoires; imprimeurs, libraires, colporteurs, pamphlétistes, journalistes, auteurs petits et grands, et un violoniste de l’opéra, tous y passent, mais rien n’y fait: dans l’ombre, les autorités de l’Etat veillent au grain et assurent l’impunité aux coupables.

Alexis Piron, gravure de Nicolas Le Mir d’après un tableau de Nicolas Bernard Michel Lépicié, dans Œuvres choisies (Paris, Duchesne, 1773).

Nos recherches révèlent une série d’initiatives malveillantes de la part des ennemis de Voltaire, Alexis Piron en tête: il est jaloux des succès de Voltaire et indigné de la désinvolture méprisante que le poète-philosophe affiche à son égard. Or, Piron fréquente Moncrif à la Société du Bout du Banc; il obtient une copie de la Lettre clandestine et la fait publier par son complice “calotin”, le journaliste La Varenne. La Marre, le protégé de Voltaire, est déjà entré dans le complot : dès 1735, il collabore avec Moncrif dans la publication d’un Recueil du cosmopolite (1735) comportant la première édition – ignorée jusqu’ici – de l’Epître à Uranie. Ce recueil fait partie d’une véritable campagne de publication des écrits compromettants de Voltaire, comme le révèle le conte anti-voltairien de Piron intitulé La Malle-Bosse, publié pour la première fois dans les Mémoires de l’Académie des colporteurs (1748) et de nouveau dans les Voltariana (1749).

François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif, portrait attribué à Maurice-Quentin de La Tour.

Notre enquête fondée sur les ornements typographiques a permis d’identifier les principaux coupables: Prault fils, d’abord, qui recueille tout écrit compromettant qui sort de la plume de Voltaire; Simon fils, ensuite, qui se cache derrière le pseudonyme de “Pierre Poppy” et publie en 1738 la première édition française de la Lettre sur Locke. Quelques années plus tard, ce même Simon fils – imprimeur officiel de l’archevêque de Paris – publie, avec l’ornement caractéristique de la “tête de philosophe ébouriffé”, les Pensées philosophiques de Diderot et l’Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines de Condillac. Les ennemis de Voltaire publient ainsi les œuvres scandaleuses de Voltaire dans l’intention de le compromettre auprès des autorités en mettant en évidence ses convictions anti-chrétiennes. Maurepas n’attend qu’un tel prétexte pour le faire condamner.

Page de titre de l’édition publiée chez Pierre Poppy en 1744.

Autre piste qui impose, elle aussi, une révision de la biographie voltairienne: la Lettre de Voltaire est connue à la cour du prince royal Frédéric (futur roi Frédéric II) à Rheinsberg, malgré l’étroite surveillance dont celui-ci fait l’objet de la part du “diable” Manteuffel, qui défend l’autorité de la philosophie de Wolff, conçue comme indispensable à l’Etat de Brandebourg à la fois comme philosophie politique de la souveraineté et comme philosophie religieuse de l’immatérialité et de l’immortalité de l’âme. La diffusion de la Lettre au Brandebourg s’explique par une indiscrétion de Thiriot, le fidèle ami et secrétaire de Voltaire, qui se fait valoir auprès du futur roi Frédéric II de Prusse en lui envoyant la Lettre clandestine de Voltaire au mois de juin 1736, bien avant que Voltaire ne décide de le faire à son tour au mois de novembre: cet envoi par Thiriot entraîne, par l’intermédiaire du marquis de La Chétardie, la conversion philosophique du prince, qui rejette désormais l’autorité de Manteuffel et le système de Wolff. Il s’avère que la diffusion secrète de la Lettre sur Locke provoque la “conversion” philosophique du prince royal, la disgrâce de Manteuffel ainsi que la rupture définitive entre l’Aufklärung wolffienne et les Lumières voltairiennes.

C’est donc une histoire doublement secrète que révèle l’édition de la version clandestine de la Lettre sur Locke. C’est grâce à ces trahisons et à cette circulation clandestine que la Lettre de Voltaire a pu jouer son rôle – avec les réflexions de Guillaume Lamy, de Bayle, de Collins et de Toland – dans l’émergence de la pensée matérialiste au cœur des Lumières françaises.

– Antony McKenna et Gianluca Mori

 

Of Voltaire’s London years and the Lettres sur les Anglais

Thanks to support from the AHRC for the publication of one of the iconic texts of the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, a.k.a. Lettres sur les Anglais (1733, published in English the same year under the title Letters concerning the English nation), the Voltaire Foundation launched both online and offline events this summer.

First page of the preface to the Letters concerning the English nation (London, 1733), the first edition of Voltaire’s text to be published.

On 27 September Professor Nicholas Cronk gave a talk entitled ‘Voltaire in London: Cultural life in the 1720s’, hosted at the Handel House Museum in London. Handel lived at 25 Brook Street in Mayfair from 1723 to 1759; Voltaire, for his part, was lodging at a rather less smart address in Soho in the latter part of the 1720s. We do not know if Handel and Voltaire ever met, but both men made significant contributions to the cosmopolitan cultural life of London in the 1720s.

Voltaire was in his early thirties and already a well-known poet when he came to London to launch a subscription to publish La Henriade, an epic poem glorifying King Henri IV of France, which touches upon the evils of religious fanaticism, among other topics. Originally, he had hoped to get permission to have it published in France with a dedication to the young Louis XV, but the subject matter of his poem was such that permission was not granted. Voltaire decided to go to London to have it published by Huguenot printers, free from censorship, and the book was dedicated to Queen Caroline.

Voltaire settled at the White Perruke on Maiden Lane in Soho, in a Huguenot area of the capital where French was widely spoken and which extended to Spitalfields. He stayed in London for two and a half years and taught himself English. He was a regular visitor at the Drury Lane theatre, where he discovered Shakespeare. He read Gulliver’s Travels in English and attended an early performance of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.

Voltaire read Addison’s Spectator, a publication whose tone and format was to prove a big influence on his own Lettres philosophiques. He met Pope, Gray and Swift, and was instrumental in popularizing Newton’s ideas in France. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1743.

(Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

Interestingly, an exhibition of waxworks organised on the Strand not long after Voltaire’s death featured an effigy of ‘that justly admired French genius’ who had been ‘in his lifetime an intimate friend to Pope, Congreve and Young’ – testament to the lasting impact of his stay in London many decades earlier.

Thanks to the AHRC grant, the Voltaire Foundation also commissioned Oxford DPhil student Cameron Quinn to write ‘Lettres sur les Anglais: getting your bearings’ for our website. This resource provides background information about the Lettres and their importance as a seminal text for the Enlightenment, and sheds light on the reasons that drove Voltaire to spend two years of his life in England; it also gives an overview of the political, as well as economic and cultural, situation in England during the years Voltaire lived here.

Thematic pages focus on several key topics that were important for society in general or to Voltaire in particular at the time the Lettres were written, and they also offer links to relevant websites. The themes covered are immensely varied in scope; they include, among others, religion, poetry, the Newtonian revolution, the English adoption of the practice of inoculation, and the question of the soul.

These webpages can be a resource for those without much prior knowledge of the wider historic or cultural contexts of the time, or of the issues at stake.

We hope our readers will enjoy this ‘rough guide’ to the Lettres sur les Anglais and the historical context in which they were written!

– Clare Fletcher

Voltaire’s London: Reconstructing a vision of London past

Academics are constantly reminded of the debts owed to previous generations of scholars. We footnote them, refer to their work, profit from their travails, build on their groundwork and sometimes correct their errors.

As the Voltaire Foundation embarks upon the critical edition of the Lettres sur les Anglais for the complete works collection, we are again delving back into the network of places that the Frenchman visited and people he encountered during his sojourn in England. A large number of scholars have already surveyed the terrain before. None, however, was quite so focussed as Norma Perry (1923-2007). Perry devoted herself to following Voltaire’s footsteps around London. She wrote a long article, ‘Voltaire in London’, for The Times which was published on 22 April 1978, demonstrating her commitment to academic impact!

It was also due to Perry that the plaque in Maiden Lane was established in 1979, and improved in 1994. Perry’s principal research outputs from her Voltaire research were Sir Everard Fawkener, Friend of Voltaire, published in the Studies in Voltaire and the eighteenth century series in 1975, and various articles and book chapters. Particularly noteworthy are the article ‘The Rainbow, the White Peruke and the Bedford Head: Voltaire’s London haunts’ (in SVEC 179, Oxford, 1979) and the chapter titled ‘City Life in the 1720s: the Example of Four of Voltaire’s Acquaintances’ in the 1994 book The Secular City: Studies in the Enlightenment presented to Haydn Mason.

Perry’s papers were left to the Taylorian Library in Oxford. Leafing through them, we learn of her singular quest to document any possible place Voltaire may (or may not!) have passed through. Her scholarship on Sir Everard Fawkener drew her to develop an interest for places Voltaire could have visited, and what those places may have looked like in the 1720s.

The various papers are also a window into research methods which remind us how far technology has come in thirty years. From the vantage point of 2016, the index cards, photographs (complete with negatives), stamped reproductions of engravings and copies of correspondence with numerous London councils seem almost as foreign as Voltaire’s own experience of London would have been. Perry’s intrepid investigations led her round London with a camera (loaded with film!) to document any possible trace of what Voltaire may have seen. This was a devoted quest, a fixation, an obsession almost. The papers function as both a testimony to Perry’s persistence and perhaps also as a warning to future scholars…

The warning is in many ways the obsession with possibilities, and the hypothetical. Perry used the evidence that is available to scholars: correspondence effectively reveals a network of people Voltaire knew and had dealings with. It also reveals the places Voltaire definitely visited. Perry’s index cards contain a whole host of ‘possible’ places Voltaire could have gone, which she subsequently investigated meticulously, honestly noting ‘no evidence’ for these. Despite this, she nevertheless ventured out to Cromwell House and photographed the fireplace, complete with its initials of the residents whom Voltaire might possibly have visited there, the Da Costa family.

The images Perry sought out are now often retrievable with the click of a mouse. Many of these images are fascinating and extremely useful in allowing us to picture the London which Voltaire was so enamoured by. The engravings of Marlborough House by Samuel Wale, for example, or images of Alexander Pope’s Villa, or Sutton Nicholls’ engraving of Covent Garden c.1720:

From Bowles, London Described or the most noted Regular Buildings, 1731.

The British Library’s Crace collection of historical maps of London has great digital applications. Perry would obviously have been thrilled by the possibility of overlaying historical maps with modern day ones.

It goes without saying that despite these amazing advances, we are still significantly indebted to scholars like Perry who have done so much spadework on which we hope to build.

– Nick Treuherz

Voltaire: historian of modernity

Voltaire’s historical writings form a significant part of his output, including works on Louis XIV, Louis XV, Charles XII, Peter the Great, the Holy Roman Empire, and even a pioneering universal history. These histories were highly regarded in his lifetime, and Voltaire was a powerful influence on the other great historians of the age, Hume, Gibbon and Robertson.

Voltaire painted by Garneray, engraved by P. M. Alix. Voltaire’s achievements are listed as ‘Philosophie, Tragédie, Histoire, Poème, La Henriade, Comédies, Temple du goût, La Pucelle, Contes, Œuvres divers’. Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France

Despite this, writers now are uncomfortable in trying to explain the importance of Voltaire as a historian. Karen O’Brien, for example, remarks that ‘Voltaire’s histories have not recovered today from the low reputation to which they sank after the French Revolution’. [1] We typically criticise Voltaire’s histories for being polemical and tendentious: his determination to view everything from a resolutely modern point of view can make him seem naïve, and some find it puzzling that his histories were once held in such esteem.

The aim of the Voltaire: historian of modernity project is to come to a better understanding of Voltaire’s overall philosophical project, by focusing on a neglected aspect of his work: his determination to write ‘modern’ history. Much of his historical writing, especially in the earlier years, is devoted to the modern world. Voltaire first explores the defining characteristics of the modern world (the benefits of trade, the scientific revolution, religious toleration) in a book about England (Lettres sur les Anglais, or Lettres philosophiques), before studying the flourishing culture of France during the previous century (Le Siècle de Louis XIV). He then extends this exploration, forwards into modern France (Précis du siècle de Louis XV), and outwards into the recent history of the whole world (Essai sur les mœurs).

The study of recent history was, Voltaire declared bluntly, ‘a matter of necessity’. [2] The study of modern times was more precise than the study of ancient history, because sources were more numerous and more reliable. Most importantly – and here Voltaire seems influenced by the English writer Bolingbroke – modern history is best placed to offer us instructive examples. Traditionally, it had always been ancient history that was thought to be significant as a source of morally improving examples of conduct. Voltaire turns that idea on its head. As an Enlightenment philosopher, he wants to teach the lessons of free thought and religious tolerance, and he turns to modern history for telling examples to prove his point.

Voltaire’s histories are not in a separate category on the margins of his œuvre: they are at its very core. We need to (re)read the modern histories alongside Voltaire’s other polemical works, and to understand them as part of one and the same project. The spirit of criticism that characterises the Enlightenment begins when we scrutinise our own age, and we cannot fully understand Voltaire the philosopher without appreciating his commitment to the study of modern history. [3]

– Nicholas Cronk

[1] Narratives of Enlightenment: cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), p.21.

[2] Conseils à un journaliste, see Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol.20A (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2003), p.482.

[3] This blog post is based on an article that first appeared in the Leverhulme Trust Newsletter in 2014.