Voltaire and Choiseul: the ever-evolving French diplomacy of 1759-1760

Louis XV, by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1748).

In May 1759 king Frederick II of Prussia sent Voltaire a poem disdaining the French king Louis XV (see Mémoires pour servir à la vie de Monsieur de Voltaire, OCV, vol.45C, p.439) and insulting his favorite, Mme de Pompadour. The Cabinet noir, empowered to read letters, informed the concerned parties, and Voltaire’s position with the French court was suddenly at stake. In a conciliatory effort, instead of waiting for lightning to strike him, Voltaire sent the poem to the duc de Choiseul, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was protected by Pompadour.

Madame de Pompadour as Diana, by Jean-Luc Nattier (1746).

Choiseul responded in kind, sending a poem ridiculing the Prussian sovereign, with a threat to publish it should Frederick disclose his to the public (D8270; part of the poem is in Mémoires, p.441). This was an invitation: either to encourage a war of words between Frederick and Choiseul, or to mediate between Prussia and France. Thus was born a utilitarian relationship, whereby Voltaire shared Frederick’s messages with the minister, suggested diplomatic actions in line with Choiseul’s policies, and, most importantly, applauded Choiseul’s every move to the public.

In response Choiseul could tactfully disseminate specific ideas of his ministry by merely corresponding with the philosophe. Because of the fame they each enjoyed, they both understood that their relationship was not entirely private, but their exchanges benefited from a veil of intimate friendship. Therefore, when salons passed around copies of Voltaire’s letters, or when Choiseul’s responses ‘accidentally’ found themselves in the hands of peers, both could retreat into the légèreté that characterized Choiseul’s ministry. Choiseul used this to his advantage to navigate the tumultuous seas of the Seven Years’ War.

Summer 1759

The first exchanges between Choiseul and Voltaire present a spunky star minister possessing shameless confidence. He responds to Frederick’s verses by calling him a coward, too insignificant to be noticed by the big players of the European arena. On top of his brazenness, he explicitly leaves Voltaire the choice of transmitting his thoughts back to the enemy. Keen to claim a sense of privacy in his correspondence, the minister nonetheless wastes no time in showing his anger over Frederick’s poetry to the Austrian ambassador.

Etienne-François, duc de Choiseul, by Louis-Michel van Loo (1763).

Choiseul’s words were not, in fact,  spontaneous or innocent. Throughout the spring of 1759 Choiseul had worked hard to inspire faith in the new alliance on both the French and Austrian sides, to convince the Austrian administration of his goodwill, and finally to ratify the new defensive treaty between France and Austria to protect against Prussian aggression on the continent. In the same vein, in his letter of 6 July 1759 (D8387) he tactfully asks Voltaire to share Frederick’s letters with the Russian ambassador to reveal Frederick’s vulgar comments on the czarina. Two days later he also sends a memoir to his ambassador to St Petersburg in which he justifies the need for more Russian involvement in the war, possibly as a mediator for peace. Empress Maria-Theresa of Austria and czarina Elizaveta of all the Russias shared a healthy diplomatic relationship, due to their common interest in crushing Prussia. Very much aware of this, Choiseul wanted to show his support for their alliance, for the continental war, and for Russia’s growing role on the European scene. The minister used these spontaneous events and the genuineness of correspondence between friends to emphasize his diplomatic commitments.

Autumn 1759

Frederick the Great, by Antoine Pesne (1757).

In his letter of 12 November of the same year (D8588) Choiseul recognizes, with optimism, the many obstacles impeding French diplomacy. News of the loss of Québec had reached France by then. He quotes the proverb placed as a motto over his door by his relative Henri-Louis de Choiseul, marquis de Meuse, ‘A force d’aller mal tout ira bien’, before sneering at his favorite target, the Prussian princeling. The minister makes more explicit links between France, Austria, and Russia, likening them to doctors curing Europe of war while Prussia is merely a soothsayer. By focusing on the continental war in his semi-public correspondence, he purposefully aligns all three powers to the eyes of the public. His growing ties with the Spanish court and his concerns for the maritime war against England are carefully omitted. Indeed, on 10 August 1759 king Carlos III ascended to the Spanish throne, advocating for a strong alliance with France and for firm defence against English sea power. The French ambassador always at his side, his plans for the Bourbon Family Pact were soon under way, much to Vienna’s dismay. Taking great care not to cause waves in the fragile Austrian alliance, Choiseul uses the cover of a friendly letter to underline his pro-Austrian and pro-Russian position on the European continent.

Winter 1759-1760

Come December, all of this has changed. Not only has France lost Québec, but the French invasion of England had been a complete, and very costly, disaster. Thankfully on 27 November England and Prussia proposed a peace congress to all belligerent parties. On 20 December  (D8666) Choiseul jokes to Voltaire about signing a peace treaty and claims France’s only quarrel is with England. Spain is boldly mentioned, and the additional risk taken of saying how war on the continent does not interest the king’s cabinet. The French minister is indirectly striking back at the request by Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Kaunitz that France forget about her maritime war and focus solely on supporting Austria. Choiseul has decided to make his distance from Austrian interests clear in this letter. Peace has become his only concern, and he actively solicits his ambassadors to Russia, Denmark, Holland and Spain in the hopes of finding a mediating power. In a letter of 14 January (D8708) the minister brags about France having the power to crush Prussia, whose only hope for survival would be a peace treaty. From his perspective, only Prussia’s enemies or his allies can make peace, not France. The duke makes his terms for peace very clear in the letter, arguing for no territorial gain on France’s behalf. While he continues to bash Frederick II with his usual panache, by winter his intentions have changed radically: instead of criticizing Frederick to show his engagement with Austria, he now ridicules the sovereign in the hopes he will realize how much Europe needs peace.

In eighteenth-century Europe, much like today, figures like Voltaire offered their fame as a channel through which savvy politicians could run their public relations. With his early letters Choiseul plugs the many holes causing the Austrian alliance to sink, portraying a unified continental alliance system that laughs in the face of German princelings. Later the minister advocates for peace on every front, formal or informal, diplomatic or social, making a point to open the way towards negotiation without pointing fingers. The recurrent coincidence in timing between his letters and news from the different battle fronts make clear the moments when Choiseul reached certain conclusions about his diplomatic strategy, and when he put them into action.

The ‘war of poems’ is discussed, with some questions about the accuracy of Voltaire’s account, in Choiseul et Voltaire: d’après les lettres inédites du duc de Choiseul à Voltaire, edited by Pierre Calmettes (Paris, 1902), p.7f. Not all the letters mentioned have survived. Those that have are available in Voltaire, Correspondence and related documents, ed. Th. Besterman, and Electronic Enlightenment, identified by D and the letter number.

– Aliénor Sauvage

The Battle of Fontenoy: a literary afterlife

The Battle of Fontenoy took place 275 years ago today, on 11 May 1745, near the city of Tournai, then in the Austrian Netherlands. The Maréchal de Saxe led French forces to victory against an allied Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian army, led by Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, who had been sent to relieve Tournai from French siege. The French were in a strong defensive position; initial frontal attacks by Cumberland’s troops proved unsuccessful, and the Anglo-Hanoverian infantry were eventually driven back by the French cavalry, artillery, and the Irish Brigade, who were serving under French command. According to Voltaire, the battle saw the death of 5339 Frenchmen, although his Scottish contemporary Tobias Smollett puts the number closer to 12,000 dead on either side.

Vue de la Bataille de Fontenoy gagnée par le Roi Louis XV sur l’armée des alliés le XI mai 1745. Engraving by S. Guélard, drawing by J.B. Brouard. (BnF/Gallica)

Following the French victory at Fontenoy, Saxe and his forces continued their advance through the Austrian Netherlands, pushing back British, Dutch, and Austrian troops over the course of the following few months. Although the Austrian Netherlands were soon returned to the Habsburgs in 1748, following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the Battle of Fontenoy nonetheless represented a great victory on the part of France and of Louis XV.

Like all great battles, Fontenoy saw a significant literary afterlife, both in the years immediately following the battle, and well after it had passed from living memory. It boasts a number of fictional heroes among its veterans. Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste is perhaps the most memorable example: ‘Un régiment passait pour aller au Camp devant Fontenoy; de dépit je m’enrôle. Nous arrivons; la bataille se donne.’ A century later, in Treasure Island, we learn that Dr Livesey was among the British soldiers Jacques faced: ‘I have served his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland, and got a wound myself at Fontenoy.’

The battle lingered and lingers on in Irish literary memory, too; the late nineteenth-century poet Emily Lawless wrote Fontenoy, 1745 from the perspective of the Irish soldiers who fought and died alongside the French. It begins:

Oh, bad the march, the weary march, beneath these alien skies,
But good the night, the friendly night, that soothes our tired eyes.
And bad the war, the tedious war, that keeps us sweltering here,
But good the hour, the friendly hour, that brings the battle near.
That brings us on to battle, that summons to their share
The homeless troops, the banished men, the exiled sons of Clare.

Voltaire, who was at the time of the battle historiographe de France, produced two literary accounts of the French victory: the Poème de Fontenoy (OCV, vol.28B, p.255-402), and two dedicated chapters in the second volume of the Précis du siècle de Louis XV (OCV, vol.29B, now published). Although ultimately a detailed and well-researched account, the chapters dedicated to Fontenoy in the Précis are not without dramatic embroidery and flourish, as we might expect from Voltaire. While Saxe is given the praise he is due, Voltaire opens by centering Louis XV as the hero of the narrative, raising morale – ‘Toute l’armée en voyant le roi et le dauphin, fit entendre des acclamations de joie’ – and showing valour and bravery in entering the fray: ‘Le roi ne voulut avoir pour sa garde qu’un escadron de cent vingt hommes de la compagnie de Charost, un seul gendarme, un chevau léger, un mousquetaire.’

Similarly, Voltaire’s use of direct speech produces a more dramatic and engaging narrative, although sometimes at the cost of the impression of total historical faithfulness; he writes, for example: ‘les Irlandais leur crièrent “Vive France”; mais dans le tumulte on n’entendait rien.’ Although effective in bringing home a striking image of the passion of the Irish soldiers in battle and the overwhelming clamour of war, it does beg the question as to how any source might have heard this battle-cry if it were indeed completely obscured by the surrounding noise.

A nineteenth-century depiction of Voltaire’s anecdote by French military painter Jean-Baptiste Édouard Detaille.

Perhaps the most famous moment of dramatic flair in Voltaire’s account, however, is an anecdote in which the British Lord Charles Hay, turning with his infantrymen to face the French troops, invites them to fire first; there ensues a brief, polite exchange of ‘after you’, ‘no, no, I insist, after you’:

Le comte de Chabannes, le duc de Biron qui s’étaient avancés et tous les officiers des gardes francaises leur rendirent le salut. Milord Charles Hay capitaine aux gardes anglaises cria: ‘Messieurs des gardes françaises, tirez.’ Le comte d’Auteroche, alors lieutenant des grenadiers et depuis capitaine, leur dit à voix haute: ‘Messieurs, nous ne tirons jamais les premiers, tirez vous-mêmes.’ Alors le capitaine anglais dit aux siens, ‘Give fire, gentlemen. Faites feu, Messieurs.’

The truth of this moment of etiquette in the heat of battle is hard to verify. Voltaire seems to be the first to publish this anecdote, which means either that he heard it from an oral source, or that it is the product of a dramatic embellishment. Regardless, it makes for an interesting and engaging story, which probably accounts for its widespread presence in subsequent literature on the battle.

Voltaire’s presentation of Fontenoy as a personal victory for Louis XV, and his dramatic, detailed account of the French victory, are no doubt in part motivated by the patriotic demands of the role of historiographe de France and a personal desire to win favour at court. The French victory at Fontenoy, and the celebratory literature produced around it, cemented it as an important moment in the history of the country, and indeed of Europe.

– Josie Dyster

Voltaire’s Louis XV, from bien-aimé to mal-aimé

The French victory at Fontenoy in 1745 provided Voltaire, newly appointed historiographe de France, with a welcome opportunity. Present with the French army on 11 May had been Louis XV himself, at his best on campaign and already nicknamed le bien-aimé. Voltaire had a distinct turn for flattery when it suited him. What could be more fitting than the composition of an account of the ‘campagnes du Roi’?

This is the context for the first half of what became Voltaire’s Précis du siècle de Louis XV (OCV, vol.29A). After Fontenoy Voltaire looked with the rest of France for a favourable and honourable peace, with French glory personified in the figure of the king. But the war dragged on until 1748, by which point Voltaire’s enthusiasm for reporting it had dwindled: ‘les détails en sont si ennuyeux’, as he said to Frederick II. It was not ideal subject matter for Europe’s most renowned poet and dramatist.

The second volume of the Précis, now published (OCV, vol.29B), completes the text, showing how what began as a celebration of the king’s campaigns transforms itself into a history of Voltaire’s time.

Accordingly, the succession of endless marches and manoeuvres, the clash and clang of victory and defeat, give way to a series of chapters featuring men whose deeds provide heroic highlights beyond the battlefield. What do Admiral George Anson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the naval adventurer Mahé de la Bourdonnais have in common? Not much, except that Voltaire bunches them together to fill out his account of the final years of a war in which he had lost interest. These characters – their literary function is as relevant as the historical examples they provide – are all instances of personal heroism and perseverance in the face of long odds.

The Shooting of Admiral Byng, on board the Monarque, 1757. (British Museum)

After the war Voltaire may have felt that he had finished with writing about conflict, but although he regarded the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) as a truce rather than a lasting peace, he did not anticipate the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756, over which he passes with comparative brevity. While the earlier war is spread across twenty-five chapters in the Précis, its sequel is compressed into just five (ch.31-35). The first of these centres on the execution of the British Admiral Byng, ‘pour encourager les autres’, followed by that of the Franco-Irish general Lally, condemned for his military failures in India. The struggle for Canada is reduced to a dispute over a few acres of snow. The struggle in Europe is reduced to a personal contest between Frederick II and the duc de Richelieu. War is no longer a realm of heroism, and it is painted in a harshly negative light. Louis XV is nowhere to be seen. Voltaire, settled into life as seigneur of Ferney, no longer had to try to flatter his king.

‘Thomas Arthur de Lally, condamné par arrêt du parlement de Paris d’avoir la tête tranchée en place de grève le 8 mai 1766’. (BnF/Gallica)

The later chapters – mostly written in the 1760s, soon after the events they describe – allow Voltaire to move beyond war. They reflect the preoccupations of the philosophe engagé that he was soon to become. Religious questions are ever-present: the problems surrounding the papal bull Unigenitus and the refusal of sacraments; the expulsion of the Jesuits from Bourbon Europe. The dangers of religious fanaticism are highlighted through chapters on Damiens’s attack on Louis XV, or the attempt on the life of the king of Portugal. Voltaire’s campaign for justice and tolerance comes to the fore in his strongly argued advocacy of judicial reform.

‘Le vrai portrait de Robert François Damiens, infâme parricide de Louis XV, le bien-aimé’. (BnF/Gallica)

These later chapters demonstrate the melding of Voltaire’s historical and philosophical concerns. The final chapter reviews the progress of l’esprit humain in Voltaire’s own time. His findings are mixed: despite some advances in certain areas, notably science, literature is in decline and can do no more than distract the reader, who would otherwise be ‘trop accablé de la contemplation des misères humaines’. As for the king, Voltaire almost blames him for bringing about his own death by sanctioning France’s failure to adopt the practice of smallpox inoculation. Louis le bien-aimé has by now become le mal-aimé.

Voltaire’s Précis du siècle de Louis XV tracks its author’s development as a philosophe, but also as a historian, analyst and commentator on his own time, making it both a summary account of the age of Louis XV and a reflection of Voltaire’s concerns over the last thirty-three years of his own career.

– Janet Godden and James Hanrahan

‘Depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours’ – mission accomplished

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!

– Janet Godden

 

 

Battles on and off the field

The eleventh of May 2015 is the 270th anniversary of the battle of Fontenoy, a great French victory in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). Voltaire’s official position as royal historiographer allowed him privileged access, for a time, to dispatches sent to Versailles from the battlefields, and he started to write an Histoire de la guerre de 1741 in which the battle of Fontenoy was central. In this he aimed to present a new kind of modern history to his contemporaries [1].

The Battle of Fontenoy (Praetiriti Fides, Exemplumque Futuri, http://pfef.free.fr/Index.htm)

 

Part of the work appeared in 1755 in an unauthorised edition, based on a stolen manuscript, rapidly followed by further editions and several English translations in 1756. Voltaire continued to develop the work and in an Avant-propos he makes the point that, in contrast to ancient history, modern history has been largely presented to the public through gazettes and newspapers, which ‘forment presque la seule histoire des changements arrivés de nos jours’ while ‘Il est important à la génération présente d’être informée au juste de ce qui la regarde’ [2]. The avant-propos was not published in Voltaire’s lifetime, as his falling out with the king made authorised publication of this work impossible. Instead the text went through several metamorphoses that were incorporated into the Essai sur les mœurs, and then the Précis du siècle de Louis XV which appeared first as an addendum to Le Siècle de Louis XIV.

Robert-François Damiens (gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France)

 

The Précis allowed for a candid view of Louis XV’s reign and reads like a contemporary political account of the period. Indeed, in the Précis Voltaire goes so far as to provide many details of the case against Robert-François Damiens, who had attacked and wounded the king, and the accusations made by this ‘régicide’ against prominent magistrates of the parlement of Paris who, Damiens claimed, had influenced his actions. Voltaire knew that ‘le parlement serait fâché qu’on vît dans l’histoire ce qu’on voit dans le procès verbal’ (D10985, 6 February 1763), but included it nonetheless. The modernity of Voltaire’s views on the need for modern history is summed up by his belief in the importance of transparency: ‘Il est utile de savoir la vérité de ce qui nous regarde, difficile de la démêler, et dangereux de la dire’ [2].

– James Hanrahan, Trinity College Dublin

[1] On this topic see Pierre Force, ‘Voltaire and the necessity of modern history’, Modern Intellectual History, 6, 3 (2009), p.457-484.

[2] Voltaire, Histoire de la Guerre de 1741, ed. by Jacques Maurens (Paris, Garnier, 1971), p.3.

Rediscovering Voltaire and Rameau’s Temple de la gloire

Le Temple de la gloire was commissioned by the duc de Richelieu to celebrate Louis XV’s return to Versailles after a famous (and rare) victory at Fontenoy, in the War of the Austrian Succession. Voltaire provided the libretto, and the piece, described variously as an opéra-ballet or ballet héroïque, was set to music by Jean-Philippe Rameau. There were two performances at court in late November and early December 1745, followed by further performances in Paris, and a short-lived revival of a revised version in 1746: since then, the piece has all but vanished.

Russell Goulbourne’s critical edition of Le Temple de la gloire in the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (vol. 28A, 2006) gets to grips for the first time with the complicated history of Voltaire’s libretto. But it is hard to fully appreciate any libretto without the music which brings it to life. Voltaire’s libretto was frequently printed in his lifetime, but Rameau’s music remained unpublished until 1909, when Saint-Saëns brought out the 1746 version of the score; the music of the 1745 version, long thought lost, has only recently turned up in the university library at Berkeley.

A French musicologist, Julien Dubruque, has just produced the first critical edition of the score (Opera omnia Rameau, vol. IV.12), its appearance in 2014 timed to coincide with the celebrations of the 250^th anniversary of the composer’s death. Much of this music has never been heard since the eighteenth century, and on 14 October 2014 a concert performance of Le Temple de la gloire was given in the beautiful eighteenth-century Opéra Royal at Versailles, with Guy Van Waas conducting his orchestra, Les Agrémens, and the Chœur de chambre de Namur. To those of us who had only heard the old LP recording made by Jean-Claude Malgoire (CBS, 1982), this concert was an amazing revelation.

Of course Le Temple de la gloire was only ever an occasional piece, but perhaps on that account we have underestimated it. The work was patently an attempt to relive the glory days of the celebrations at the court of Louis XIV. But if Louis XV was clearly uncomfortable in the shoes of the Sun King, Rameau and Voltaire, on the evidence of this concert, could certainly fill the shoes of Lully and Quinault. The re-emergence of Rameau’s glorious music – and a recording of the concert is to be released – should encourage us to return to Voltaire’s libretto and reassess his achievement as a writer for the Court.

The concert can be heard on the website of France Musique until 13 November 2014.

For more on eighteenth-century libretti, see Le Livret d’opéra en France au XVIIIe siècle, by Béatrice Didier.

– Nicholas Cronk

Shadows at the court of the Sun King

2015 marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose reign (1643-1715) defined the era of the ‘Grand Siècle’ and saw France rise to become the dominant player on the European stage. The Voltaire Foundation, in collaboration with the Château de Versailles, is preparing to publish Voltaire’s seminal account of his reign, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) to coincide with this anniversary.

The unceasing production of works throughout Voltaire’s long life often causes attention to be focused on his later years, and it is easy to forget that he was himself a product of the age of Louis XIV, being 20 when the king died. Few people could have remembered the Sun King’s accession, and the change of regime in 1715 must have been a uniquely unsettling experience, more so because of a series of deaths in the royal family between 1711 and 1714, which left as the only viable Bourbon successor to the king a frail great-grandson still in his infancy.

In 1714 Louis XIV was in his 76th year and, according to the chronicler Saint-Simon, fearing death, either natural or by poison. In an attempt to dilute the influence of the Orléanist faction (the family of his younger brother), he promulgated the édit de Marly in July, which allowed his illegitimate children to succeed were the Bourbon line to fail. In the same year he rewrote his will, setting up a regency council, on which the ‘bastards’, as Saint-Simon called them, were also to serve. This provision was swiftly annulled after Louis’s death the following year.

1. Louis XIV’s will, dated 2nd August 1714.

By contrast the 19-year-old Voltaire in 1714 was preoccupied with an unhappy love affair and the dullness of his incipient administrative and legal career. But when, years later, he set to work seriously on his long-planned project of writing one of the first major accounts of the reign of the Sun King, he was relying not just on historical sources and documents, or even on verbal accounts from his older contemporaries, but crucially on his own recollections and emotional responses to the events he describes.

And it shows. This passage about Louis XIV’s marriage in 1660 has an abstract, almost fairy-tale quality, with its hero and heroine providing a tableau of splendour and gallantry, reminiscent of the hyperbolic descriptions found in novels such as La Princesse de Clèves (1678):

‘Tout prit, au mariage de Louis XIV, un caractère plus grand de magnificence et de goût, qui augmenta toujours depuis. Quand il fit son entrée avec la reine son épouse, Paris vit avec une admiration respectueuse et tendre, cette jeune reine qui avait de la beauté, portée dans un char superbe d’une invention nouvelle; le roi à cheval à côté d’elle, paré de tout ce que l’art avait pu ajouter à sa beauté mâle et héroïque, qui arrêtait tous les regards.’

2. Wedding of Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, 9th June 1660.

In describing the shock of the series of deaths in the royal family, Voltaire communicates a real sense of how disquieting this period must have been. In chapter 23, he describes how the king’s personal grief becomes conflated with political catastrophe: ‘toutes ces infortunes domestiques [i.e. the deaths in the king’s family], jointes aux étrangères et à la misère publique, faisaient regarder la fin du règne de Louis XIV comme un temps marqué pour la calamité; et l’on s’attendait à plus de désastres, que l’on n’avait vu auparavant de grandeur et de gloire.’

Voltaire returns to the same events later in the work (chapter 27), and this time is even more explicit about his own recollections, using ‘nous’, and even ‘je’ to describe the emotional impact of the events, years later.

3. This composite picture of the Bourbon succession from Henri IV (seen as a bust in the background along with Louis XIII) features Louis XIV (seated), the Grand Dauphin (leaning against his father’s chair) and the duc de Bourgogne on the right. The infant Louis XV is being led by the duchesse de Ventadour, who seems to have commissioned the painting to celebrate her role in ensuring the continuation of the Bourbon dynasty (by saving the future Louis XV from the measles epidemic that killed the other members of his family).

‘Ce fut le sort de Louis XIV de voir périr en France toute sa famille par des morts prématurées, sa femme à quarante-cinq ans, son fils unique à cinquante; et un an après que nous eûmes perdu son fils, nous vîmes son petit-fils le Dauphin duc de Bourgogne, la Dauphine sa femme, leur fils aîné le duc de Bretagne, portés à St Denis au même tombeau au mois d’avril 1712; tandis que le dernier de leurs enfants, monté depuis sur le trône, était dans son berceau aux portes de la mort. Le duc de Berri, frère du duc de Bourgogne, les suivit deux ans après; et sa fille, dans le même temps, passa du berceau au cercueil.

‘Ce temps de désolation laissa dans les cœurs une impression si profonde, que dans la minorité de Louis XV j’ai vu plusieurs personnes, qui ne parlaient de ces pertes qu’en versant des larmes.’

Nearly 40 years later, despite the middle-aged Louis XV being established on his throne, Voltaire is transported back to how disorienting it was to have almost the entire direct royal succession, the future of France, wiped out, and for the dynasty to take a different direction, with a decadent regency and an infant king. In contrast to the abstract and distant ‘Paris’ and ‘on’ of the earlier passages, here we have compelling direct testimony from ‘plusieurs personnes’, as well as the sympathetic ‘je’ recalling such a ‘temps de désolation’, all weeping for the lost line of promising Bourbon kings.

–AO