SOURCE: O'Brien, Karen. “Voltaire's Neoclassical Poetics of History.” In Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, pp. 21-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, O'Brien surveys Voltaire's histories, culminating in a study of the Essai sur les moers. O'Brien situates Voltaire in the early Enlightenment debates about the value and accuracy of history, suggesting that Voltaire used literary techniques to revive the status of history as a serious genre.]

Before his apotheosis as the personification of the Enlightenment, Voltaire was known to French, British and American readers, perhaps primarily, as a historian of France and the world.¹ Before he became demonised, in nineteenth-century eyes, as the prophet of atheism, Voltaire's histories were perused by appreciative and unperturbed readers throughout the continent and its colonies.² Voltaire's histories have not recovered today from the low reputation to which they sank after the French Revolution, and the last book-length study of these works is now nearly forty years old.³ Without wishing to make excessive claims for their merit and influence, this chapter will attempt to assess the distinctive and original contribution made by Voltaire's histories to cosmopolitan history in the eighteenth century. Most of these works belong roughly to the middle period of his career during which time he enjoyed a measure of official sanction and approval from Louis XV, who appointed him historiographer royal in 1745, and from Frederick II of Prussia.⁴ Voltaire's major histories include L'Histoire de Charles XII (1731), Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751 and after) and the Essai sur les mœurs (1754 and after), all of them many times reissued, revised and translated during his lifetime. Together, these works represent a sustained and wide-ranging exploration of the literary, cognitive and thematic potential of historical narrative. As literary works, they make new commitments to form and style which exceed and displace older rhetorical theories of purpose and expression. As meta-historical investigations of the cognitive problems of retelling the past, they contribute something to contemporary French philosophical debate, although their engagement with these rather involved epistemological matters was not the primary source of their appeal in the very dissimilar philosophical and religious environments of Britain and America where such questions were differently framed and differently answered. It was the thematic concerns of Voltaire's histories, which centred upon the evolution and existence of a unique, common European civilisation, that particularly attracted an international readership. Voltaire was the first historian to articulate in detail an Enlightenment narrative of the rise of Europe as it was hastened by the growing wealth and independence of the middle orders of society. He was the first to explain the political utility of this common sense of European identity, and the first to show how this sense of identity had a more solidly political basis than the older Renaissance notion of a shared classical heritage. Despite all this, Voltaire was never entirely at ease with the narrative enterprise of history; in all of his works, the desire to explain competes with besetting scepticism about the possibility of historical explanation, the earnest endeavour to research conflicts with a disingenuous contempt for serious historical scholars, and the cosmopolitan historian of France sometimes gives way to the champion of French cosmopolitanism. The result is a historical writing more complex and contradictory than he may have intended. I intend to discuss, in turn, the cognitive, literary and thematic aspects of Voltaire's histories in the hope of restoring to (sometimes unenvisaged) complexity a historian often dismissed as an unthinking apostle of progress.⁵

RECONSTRUCTION

Seventeenth-century French intellectuals regarded history primarily as the site of cognitive questions which ultimately had to do with the nature and value of all factual data. Many sceptics, or ‘pyrrhonists’ of the period, motivated by both scientific and anti-religious (‘libertin’) principles, doubted the reliability and usefulness of historical knowledge. By undermining the epistemological foundations of narrative and scholarly history, they lowered the prestige of this previously buoyant Renaissance discipline.⁶ Descartes' rationalist solutions to this scepticism had the effect of further disgracing history, along with scholasticism, as outmoded forms of cognition. Towards the end of the century, however, the fortunes of the discipline revived somewhat, and Pierre Bayle's celebrated Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) did a great deal to re-establish history as a discrete field of knowledge capable of delivering truths whose status could not be determined by Cartesian methodology.⁷ Voltaire grew up intellectually during a period of reconstructive historical thinking during which interest had at last begun to shift from the ontological to the anthropological value of historical knowledge.⁸ By then the pyrrhonian debate had been channelled into evidentiary questions and away from the problem of the ultimate value of historical inquiry. As a young man, Voltaire would have encountered the famous scholarly debates in the 1720s between scholarly and pyrrhonian members of the French Académie des Inscriptions over the reliability of information about the very earliest history of Rome.⁹ One academician, Nicholas Fréret, in an essay entitled ‘Réflexions sur l'étude des anciennes histoires’, made an important contribution to the debate by arguing that the problem of historical scepticism sprang from a persistent false analogy between history and the mathematical sciences. He defined history as a separate cognitive field, and laid down the principles for an empirical method in historical inquiry.¹⁰

Voltaire's early intellectual endeavours were directed towards similar ends. As well as forging a successful writing career as a poet and playwright, the young Voltaire schooled himself as a metaphysician; he mounted a challenge to the mathematical certainties of French rationalist philosophy in the name of English scientific empiricism (for example, the Eléments de la philosophie de Newton, 1738). His collection of essays on English culture, the Lettres philosophiques (1734) did much to publicise the work of Newton and Locke in France. He praised them both for having found reasonable empirical resolutions to the problem of pyrrhonism, even describing Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding as a form of history: ‘Tant de raisonneurs ayant fait le roman de l'âme, un sage est venu qui en a fait modestement l'histoire.’¹¹ Although Voltaire sometimes contrived to make Newton, in particular, sound like the prophet of all kinds of moral and historical inevitabilities, he always tried to preserve this early commitment to reasonable empiricism in the historical domain.¹² As he later remarked, ‘Je ne veux ni un pyrrhonisme outré, ni une crédulité ridicule.’¹³

Despite improvements in the philosophical fortunes of history in the first decades of the eighteenth century, this form of writing still lacked prestige and credibility when Voltaire started to publish his major histories in the 1750s. The subject was little esteemed, for example, by the editors of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert and Diderot prefaced their work with a table of human knowledge (1751) which arranged ‘history’ (sacred, ecclesiastical and civil) under the taxonomic heading of ‘memory’, along with natural history, the arts and crafts. The table thereby separated history from the more advanced mental category of ‘reason’ under which it grouped philosophy and the mathematical sciences, implicitly downgrading its cognitive function. When Voltaire came to write the ‘Histoire’ entry for the Encyclopédie, along with other ‘H’ articles, he observed, in implicit protest, that natural history is a physical science rather than a subset of history, and devoted most of the piece to refuting the notion that history is an unreliable form of human knowledge.¹⁴

Voltaire never resolved to his own satisfaction the problem of historical knowledge in his histories. Even in the last revisions to the Essai sur les mœurs, carried out at the end of his life, he continued to tinker with words and phrases conveying notions of facticity and causality. His pyrrhonian predecessors had tried to detach history from narrative by arguing that the narrative piecing together of the past entailed unwarranted reification of the primary factual data. In most of Voltaire's historical works, the problem hovers in abeyance, and these doubts are suspended in the rhetorical medium of narrative. He settles willingly for a traditional presentation of history as a branch of demonstrative rhetoric, and he apportions praise or blame according to unusually broadly conceived political and cultural imperatives. Even so, when he composed his political and cultural narratives of France and the world, Voltaire had few fully realised French narrative histories upon which to draw. There were some exceptions. History had survived the crise pyrrhonienne as a narrative art in the semi-fictionalised histoires galantes of fashionable authors such as Varillas and Saint-Réal. Voltaire found ‘sublime’ Saint-Réal's Conjuration des Espagnols contre la République de Venise en l'année 1618 (1674), an elegant neo-Machiavellian study of psychological and political motive whose character study set pieces probably influenced the Histoire de Charles XII (and, incidentally, inspired Thomas Otway's tragedy, Venice Preserved).¹⁵ Voltaire was impressed by the ability of these historiens galants to give shape to historical data within a single critical perspective. Their work, however, was really an anecdotal outgrowth of humanist history written in the voice of experienced hommes d'état; Voltaire, although he shared this commitment to history as a branch of rhetoric, sought a more representative voice and questioned the value of anecdotes. These histoires galantes, moreover, had few scholarly ambitions. They bear witness to the fact that the crise pyrrhonienne in historical thought had effected a marked dissociation of philosophical historiography from the information-gathering side of history. On the scholarly side, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France had played host to an extraordinary flowering of historical learning, including the pioneering work of the clerical scholars of the Benedictine Congregation of St Maur in the study and criticism of primary sources, and in new techniques in lexicography, diplomatics and palaeography.¹⁶ The leading figure in this enterprise, Jean Mabillon, showed some interest in the narrative presentation of history, including, for example, the role of cultural forces in the shaping of events.¹⁷ In general however, these scholars were not concerned to establish additional veracity for their researches on a philosophical basis, and were otherwise annalists dealing only with the seriality of events.

Despite these developments, there was one form of narrative history which had continued untroubled and unabated throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This was the chronological history of France, a compendious and compliant genre whose traditions and royal patronage (as Chantal Grell has shown in her excellent study of eighteenth-century history in France) enabled it to withstand most philosophical and scholarly innovations.¹⁸ Two of the most significant histories of France to precede Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, Mézeray's Histoire de France (1643-51), and Daniel's Histoire de France (1713), appeared at the beginning and end of Louis XIV's personal reign.¹⁹ Although constantly lambasted by Voltaire, these two works anticipate his histories in their refusal to surrender broad sweeps of developmental narrative to the ravages of Pyrrhonism. However, like most traditional dynastic histories of the nation, Mézeray's work rarely rises above the annalistic, in spite of its stylishness. Daniel's Histoire announces its ambition to avoid scepticism, and to produce ‘un tissu et une suite de faits véritables’, as well as the intention to include, ‘les Coûtumes, les Usages, les Loix, la Jurisprudence, la manière du Gouvernement Civil et Militaire’, although, in practice, it does not keep either of these promises.²⁰

Voltaire's solution to the poverty of national history and to the philosophical depreciation of history was, I shall argue, to effect a closer rapprochement between history and literature. He was, by the time he came to compose his narrative histories, an acknowledged master in the genres of epic and tragedy. He executed and interpreted his plays and poems according to the neoclassical principles of criticism elaborated in the late seventeenth century, and soon conceptualised his histories in similar ways. Boileau, Le Bossu, Bouhours and other neoclassical critics of the preceding century had elaborated a theory of literature which cogently defended its integrity and social utility, and so protected it from devaluation by philosophers and moralists.²¹ By arranging his histories within identifiable literary structures (not excluding the Essai sur les mœurs), Voltaire hoped to annex similar prestige to history. Voltaire also imported from neoclassical theory the notion of ‘vraisemblance’ which encapsulated the moral and aesthetic requirement that literature should treat only of the natural and probable, and never of the fantastic, trivial or debased. The notion of vraisemblance provided a convenient means of reconciling the narrative and cognitive demands of the medium of history, and acted as a means of arbitrating both oddities in his source material and potential inconsistencies in his narrative. Voltaire also embraced the ethical function performed by neoclassical literature; like poetry, history must assert civilised standards, and harmonise moral, social and aesthetic values. Given the secondary status which neoclassical criticism assigned to mock genres, mock epic (the collapse of epic into satire instigated by a voice comically aware of the gap between the grandeur of the poem's structure and the low stature of its subject) cannot be taken as the paradigm for Voltaire's historical work, let alone Enlightenment history as a whole (as Hayden White has assumed).²² Voltaire constantly struggled to sustain history as a serious genre, and to resist the satirical treatment which much of his material appeared to require.

EPIC BEGINNINGS

Before turning to Voltaire's major histories, some understanding of the literary roots of his historical method can be gained from an examination of his earlier engagement with historical epic in poetry and prose. His first historical production was an epic poem about the life of Henri IV, published first as La Ligue (1723), and then recast as La Henriade (1728). These were succeeded in 1731 by Voltaire's first prose history, the highly accomplished Histoire de Charles XII of Sweden. Many features of Voltaire's historical method were worked out in this transition from poetry to prose. This development was also facilitated by Voltaire's meditation on the problems of poetics, national culture and changing standards of taste in the (English) Essay upon the epick poetry of the European nations.²³ In all of these can be detected the neoclassical roots of Voltaire's historical practice. The Henriade narrates the story, in Alexandrine couplets, of the religious wars of late sixteenth-century France up to the point when the victorious Henri de Navarre is about to accede to the throne. The poem updates for the eighteenth century the traditional myth of Henry IV as a peace-loving, tolerant philosopher king.²⁴ In structure and tone it conforms to neoclassical rules for epic poetry, beginning in medias res, maintaining a consistently formal register, and blending decorousness and plausibility (‘vraisemblance’). The deeper historical drama in the poem is enacted by abstract types (with names such as ‘Discorde’, ‘Fanatisme’, ‘Politique’, ‘Vérité’). Like his precursor epic and mock-epic poets, such as Chapelain and Boileau, Voltaire situates the substance and meaning of history in suprahistorical types.²⁵ There are, however, some innovations. Voltaire's idealised hero, Henri de Navarre, is a social improver as well as a warrior king. In the Essay upon the epick poetry, Voltaire argues that epic poetry, as well as having universal appeal, must mirror the peculiarities and meet the specific needs of its country of origin. Much of the Essay is an evaluation of epic poets, including Homer, Milton and Camöens, in national context, and it demonstrates that, although all great epic poems are and must be obedient to certain formal principles, their content and mode of formal adaptation are culturally determined. For example, he finds Milton's ‘Idiom … wonderfully heighten'd, by the Nature of the Government, which allows the English to speak in Publick’.²⁶ Thus, in conformity with his own critical principles, Voltaire attempted to adapt the rules of epic poetry in his own epic poem La Henriade to the cultural imperatives of his French audience by reminding them, at a time of heated religious and social debate, of their innate gifts for order and conciliation.²⁷

Voltaire's next foray into the genre of historical epic took the form of a short narrative history of the life of King Charles XII of Sweden (1682-1718), a man who thought he was Alexander the Great and set out to conquer Poland, the Baltic states and Russia. The product of the extreme severity of the Swedish climate, Charles believed (at least, according to Voltaire's account) that his self-mastery would lead inevitably to mastery of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but he suffered defeat at the hands of Czar Peter I, was held captive by the Ottomans at Bender, and was eventually killed during the siege of a minor Norwegian fortress. The facts of the case are so patently the stuff of mock epic (Fielding, who translated an account of the life of Charles by G. Adlerfeld, exploited its comic potential in the eponymous protagonist of Jonathan Wild who modelled himself on the Swedish king) that most critics have assumed this to be the generic orientation of Voltaire's work.²⁸ However, the text is, in fact, rather more remarkable for its reluctance to seize the mock epic opportunities presented by the primary material, or to exploit the potentially comic gap between Charles' epic self-image and the defeated or even bizarre circumstances in which he frequently finds himself. When, for example, Charles is dragged away by his legs and arms from the residence in Bender which he had vainly attempted to defend against the overwhelming strength of the sultan's forces, Voltaire barely comments. Similarly, when Charles dies in petty circumstances, hit in the eye by a stray bullet on a minor campaign, Voltaire resists the temptation to dwell upon this apparent piece of poetic justice (‘A petty fortress, and a dubious hand’, in Johnson's poetic retelling of this story).²⁹ Instead, Voltaire follows this episode with a set-piece moralising passage describing how virtues pushed to excess can become destructive vices. The emphasis is placed more strongly upon the inhumane consequences of such vices than upon Charles' comic defeat: ‘homme unique plutôt que grand homme; admirable plutôt qu'à imiter. Sa vie doit apprendre aux rois combien un gouvernement pacifique et heureux est au-dessus de tant de gloire’ (272-3). While it is certainly the case, as one critic has suggested, that the Swedish king ‘personifies the [deluded] view that history is essentially epic in nature’, Voltaire does not expose Charles' epic pretensions by means of a generic descent into mock epic, and the conventions of humanist biography are retained with knowing gravity.³⁰

Voltaire's critique of Charles is thrown into relief by his admiring presentation of the reforming and patriot Czar Peter I of Russia. In the Histoire de Charles XII, the climactic event of the history, a titanic encounter between Charles and Peter at the Battle of Poltava (1709), is dramatically enlarged as the confrontation between two great styles of monarchy: ‘l'un [Charles] glorieux d'avoir donné des Etats, l'autre [Peter] d'avoir civilisé les siens; Charles aimant les dangers et ne combattant que pour la gloire; Alexiowitz ne fuyant point le péril, et ne faisant la guerre que pour ses intérêts’ (161). Peter is the history's displaced centre of seriousness, and subsequent revisions to the book shift the balance of interest further in his direction.³¹ Peter subsequently featured as the hero of Voltaire's more blatantly hagiographic Histoire de L'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand (1759-63) where he is portrayed as a secular, progressive ruler, and symbol of Russia's potential modernity. The moral centre of L'Histoire de Charles XII is thus to be found at the margin of the plot, in the person of Peter, and does not simply emanate from the disguised moral voice of the mock-epic historian. Unlike Charles' barbaric false heroics, Peter's ruthlessness is excused since, understood properly in national context, it is indispensable to his programme of reform in Russia. L'Histoire de Charles XII retains many of the tonal and structural features of La Henriade. The work demonstrates Voltaire's quest for an authorial point of view which absorbs neoclassical seriousness into the present tense, but which remains committed to the organising, authoritative proficiency of traditional genre. Prose epic is still, for Voltaire, appropriate to the presentation of national history, but only in cases where rulers have enacted their epic history in ways suited to the peculiarities and demands of their nation and time. Peter the Great personifies an epicity properly adapted to modern Russia; Charles XII compels his country to take part in an outdated heroic saga. Voltaire works within a neoclassical aesthetic which places upon literature the demands of universal ethical validity, but which is also amenable to the historical particularities of its subject-matter.

In the years which followed, Voltaire ventured into more ambitious historical territory. The moral complexities of his new material, and its greater intractability to unified narrative exposition soon led to a doubling of voice in Voltaire's histories—one part engaged with events as constituents of an epic or a tragedy, the other providing a moralising commentary from a more distanced perspective. By this manœuvre, Voltaire continued to forestall the collapse of history into mock-epic without abandoning a sense of critical distance. Of the Siècle de Louis XIV, he remarked:

J'envisage encore le siècle de Louis XIV comme celui du génie, et le siècle présent comme celui qui raisonne sur le génie.³²

One part of the authorial voice, he claims, is fully engaged with the part epic, part tragic age of Louis XIV (‘le siècle … du génie’), and the other is situated in a distanced present, possessing the rational clarity of the modern critic but not the creativity of genius (‘celui qui raisonne sur le génie’). By comparison with the Siècle de Louis XIV, the Histoire de Charles XII and the Histoire de l'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand (1759-63) suffer artistically from a lack of such a split voice; the modernity of the authorial perspective is too completely identified with Peter and the progress of his national epic adventure. In the Histoire de Charles XII, Voltaire investigated the generic pertinence of epic to recent events, and this had led him to an implicit periodisation of heroic and modern forms of historical behaviour. French historians of his era, as Grell has shown, used only rudimentary schemes of historical periodisation, and Voltaire was more energetic than most in seeking to divide history up into distinct epochs.³³ The Siècle de Louis XIV opens with a famous passage singling out the four great ages of the arts in human history: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy and, best of all, the reign of Louis XIV. By clear implication, the authorial commentator is situated in the separate and inferior period of the present. This idea of present-day France is consistent with the commonplace neoclassical notion of declension; as soon as a civilisation reaches its apex, it must inevitably fall into decline. However, Voltaire's first major history also incorporates, in an innovative way, the idea of a distinct critical voice, engendered by this separately periodised modernity, which speaks from the cultural realm to the political sphere of history, tradition and law. The nature of this voice will merit further investigation, but it will first be necessary to say something of the origins of Voltaire's idea of the cultural authority of the historian.

The notion of the emancipation of art from tradition was a paradoxical and persistent feature of French neoclassicism. Since Malherbe early in the seventeenth century, neoclassical theorists had been concerned with the elaboration of artistic rules which might stand independently of their classical origins. The process reached an extreme point when, in 1687, Charles Perrault delivered a famous address in praise of ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand’ in which he celebrated the unity of inspiration behind his times and its artistic superiority over the classical past upon which it had hitherto relied.³⁴ With this speech, the age-old quarrel of the ancients and the moderns entered a new phase, as the moderns tried to accelerate the detachment of French classicism from the classics, in the name of a cultural nationalism which the ancients found both presumptuous and historically ignorant. The quarrel was still rumbling on when Voltaire first came to Paris in the late 1710s, and, in some respects, the Siècle de Louis XIV is a retrospective evaluation of the debate. As in England, the French quarrel in the early eighteenth century turned on the merits of Homer and the extent to which art could be said to have progressed since his times.³⁵ The modern camp included those, such as Homer's none-too-faithful verse translator Houdart de la Motte, who thought that the past, and past epic poets, were largely unintelligible and not worth meticulous attention, and those, such as the Abbé Terrasson, who proclaimed, by extravagant analogy with mathematical rules, the liberation of art from tradition.³⁶ As a scientist of art, Terrasson believed that art was reducible to mathematical laws and could therefore be expected to progress as rapidly in the eighteenth century as physics had done in the seventeenth. Voltaire, though he generally preferred to see himself as occupying the middle ground between the two camps, once expressed some enthusiasm for this idea: ‘Peut-être arrivera-t-il bientôt dans la manière d'écrire l'histoire ce qui est arrivé dans la physique.’³⁷ In England, meanwhile, the debate was reversed, as the scholarly side of the argument fell to the moderns, with ancients such as Temple, Swift and Pope, struggling in different media, and with differing degrees of irony, to preserve the pristine authority of the classics. The greater willingness of both sides in the French debate to acknowledge that, for good or ill, Homer was the product of a more primitive period in history, had its origins in their self-confident recognition of the national uniqueness and novelty of French cultural modernity. The French moderns, whatever their scholarly limitations, set a new, irreverent tone in cultural debate. Their extrapolation of aesthetics from tradition licensed a new spirit of critical freedom which coincided with a relaxation in the demands of official ideology towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV and during the Regency which followed. The French modern confidence in the universal validity of certain aesthetic rules—rules which Homer, in his understandable primitive ignorance, did not know how to follow—was not, as Pope scornfully suggested in An Essay on Criticism (1711), merely a mirror-image in the artistic domain of absolutist monarchical law (‘But Critic Learning flourish'd most in France: / The Rules, a Nation born to serve, obeys’, lines 712-13), but the insistent recognition of cultural norms wider than political structures. Voltaire found liberating this post-classical neoclassicism with its exuberant periodisation of modern civilisation. In the Siècle de Louis XIV, he would also try to situate himself as a writer in this normative modernity from which to scrutinise history, politics and tradition. His critical position, like that of other moderns, would be secured in the aesthetic sphere. Much of the Siècle de Louis XIV is a panegyric of the French state in its great age of absolutism, yet, as Perrault had demonstrated, the artistic assessment of a state can also imply the existence of cultural rules over and above the decisions of an absolute monarch.³⁸

LE SIèCLE DE LOUIS XIV

Voltaire's preoccupation with the relationship between history, good kingship and good art led him to produce a history of France which is both highly crafted at the aesthetic level, and engaged, at the discursive level, in a complex appraisal of the role of aesthetics in political life. During composition and revision of the Siècle de Louis XIV, additional complications arose as Voltaire wrestled with the problem of how to achieve form in historical writing while resisting the unwelcome stasis and closure which it seemed to impose. Voltaire became increasingly aware of his own authorial location in a separately periodised critical modernity. He conferred upon his subject-matter, one of the great epochs of human civilisation, the coherence of a work of art whose constituent parts have the quality of universal types. However, the temporal perspective mandated by his self-conscious authorial subjectivity inevitably competes with and contextualises this perfected world of types. The context into which the authorial voice transposes the sealed age of Louis XIV is not primarily an ironic one, and a double authorial perspective is strenuously maintained, identified partly with his age and partly with the less brilliant reign of Louis XV. By avoiding both sustained irony and nostalgia, Voltaire is able to generate a secondary critical account of eighteenth-century French modernity and nationality. The Siècle is directly engaged with eighteenth-century political controversy, and is partly intended to provide a critique of the legal-theoretical foundations of these contemporary debates, particularly as they had been expounded by Montesquieu. Throughout the work, nationality is shown to be more essentially a matter of cultural identity than of legal history or political boundaries. Throughout the Siècle de Louis XIV, Voltaire makes neoclassical history a weapon with which to engage and even disable contemporary political debate about the nature of the French state.

Although a portion of the Siècle de Louis XIV had appeared in 1739, and Voltaire had started the work at least as far back as 1735, the first major text did not come out until 1751, followed by a significantly revised and expanded edition in 1753.³⁹ In 1756 this was incorporated as the final part of the Essai sur les mœurs in the Geneva collected works; further alterations were made in 1761-3, and the last major series of authorial revisions was added in 1768.⁴⁰ Voltaire drew upon a wide range of secondary source material, including a number of regency histories of Louis XIV's time, but also relied heavily upon the oral recollections which he had meticulously collected in England and in France while still a young man.⁴¹ Voltaire insisted throughout that the work was more than a mere annalistic or military history (‘point … une simple relation des campagnes, mais plutôt une histoire des mœurs des hommes’). The work is divided into two separate halves; the first is, in fact, a briskly narrated chronological history of the period, military campaigns and all, and the second contains all the material relating to the ‘mœurs’ of the age. The history begins, appropriately enough, with an artistic event: the founding by Richelieu of the Académie Française (618: 1753, I, 189). The first part of the history moves from an overview of the age of Richelieu to the chaotic mid-century years of the Frondes under the regency of Anne of Austria. Once Louis' personal reign begins in earnest in 1661, Voltaire supplies quite detailed military histories of his conquests in the Netherlands and Germany through to the War of the Spanish Succession. The second part of the Siècle contains a substantial selection of anecdotes relating to Louis' private life and court, and then deals at length with the internal politics of France during his reign, followed by economic, artistic and scientific developments, and the religious controversies surrounding Jansenism, Quietism and Huguenot persecution. All editions have, as an appendix, catalogues of significant artists and other personages of the period. The chronological portion of the work is artistically crafted as a tragic drama, in which the protagonist, Louis XIV, at first rises to the height of success (‘comble de sa grandeur’) in 1688, and then overreaches himself to the point when, after the Battle of Blenheim, his mistress, Mme de Maintenon is at last obliged to tell him that he is no longer invincible (‘qu'il n'était plus invincible’) (759, 834: 1753, I, 254; 1753, I, 377). He eventually dies en philosophe, a little the wiser for his sufferings.⁴²

Louis' heroic tragedy is incorporated into a larger epic tale of France's greatness and defeat in its most glorious era. This era appears to have the coherence of a work of literature, being sealed off from the events which precede and follow it. The period before Louis' reign is rendered wholly in terms of negatives; this is a time of gothic barbarity (‘barbarie gothique’), without regular laws (‘lois … fixes’)—not so much pre-modern as the opposite of modern when a total lack of Enlightenment (‘défaut de lumières’) permeates all aspects of life (619, 634: 1753, I, 7; 1753, I, 43). In the 1739 chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV, there were originally some references to the existence of men of talent prior to Louis XIV's personal reign, but these are suppressed in 1751 for starker effect. History before Louis XIV is redefined as absence (‘point d'académies, point de théâtres réguliers’, 635: 1753, I, 44). Voltaire evokes, not historical evolution, but positive and negative manifestations of order. Like Perrault before him, Voltaire identifies and celebrates discontinuities between the age of Louis XIV and the chaos which came before. Louis himself is mainly functionally related to the form of the history through his body politic. He is a shadowy figure, more of a principle than a personality, with little private moral presence in the work. This artistic conflation of the king as protagonist and the actions of the state resembles the Histoire de … Pierre le Grand: ‘Enfin Pierre naquit, et la Russie fut formée’ (388).

Voltaire depicts Louis XIV's France as a state self-consciously reinventing itself as an ordered and unified work of art. Economic, military and legal reforms under Louis XIV, as well as improvements in technology and communications, are described as modernisations contributing to the formal unity of the state: ‘l'Etat devient un tout régulier dont chaque ligne aboutit au centre’ (980: 1753, II, 147). Allegiance to this reforming state by its subjects is a matter of good taste, and all those able to perceive the formal harmoniousness of the state (‘un tout régulier’) wish to participate by vying with each other in the service of their sovereign (979: 1753, II, 147). Voltaire praises Louis' administration as an interventionist, mercantilist, centralised government of the talented. He regards developments in manufactures and trade as the most significant factors behind France's economic success, and Louis' chief minister, Colbert, a figure often disparaged in the eighteenth century, is rehabilitated as the pioneer of protectionist economics and promoter of commerce in luxury goods—a judgment Voltaire was not subsequently inclined to revise even after personal contacts with French physiocrats such as Turgot. Meanwhile, artistic life in France flourishes under Louis' personal governance, and the national language acquires purity and stability (‘la langue commençait à s'épurer et à prendre une forme constante’, 1003: 1753, II, 179). The prestige of the nation is enhanced by the growing international influence of French culture; in 1752, Voltaire added a passage underlining this point:

Sa langue [France's] est devenue la langue d'Europe. … L'esprit de société est le partage naturel des Français; c'est un mérite et un plaisir dont les autres peuples ont senti le besoin.

(1017: 1753, II, 205)

Indeed, as this national history evolved over a number of stages of revision, Voltaire showed increasing signs of the cosmopolitan historical sensibility which would develop more fully in the Essai sur les mœurs. For example, in 1757, he added a chapter entitled ‘Des beaux-arts en Europe’ which projects an image of Europe as an increasingly civilised, culturally interdependent system of states.

CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF MONARCHY

Voltaire's retelling of the myth of the Sun King, in terms slightly more cosmopolitan but no less ardent than Louis' original propagandists, came as a surprise to contemporary audiences. The myth had been in decline since the Regency when it was dismantled by aristocratic critics of absolutism, and its rehabilitation in the middle of the century appeared to some to insinuate unfavourable comparisons with Louis XV's troubled and lack-lustre monarchy.⁴³ Nevertheless, Louis XV is not, in fact, the concealed satirical target of the Siècle de Louis XIV. Rather, Voltaire, as historiographer royal, aims to approach the ages of Louis XIV and Louis XV by means of a new narrative representation and endorsement of the institution of monarchy. The Siècle de Louis XIV, with its splendid tableaux of war abroad and lavish peace at court, stages a return to the baroque idea of history as spectacle, while inviting its eighteenth-century audience to contemplate the political nature of their own spectatorship. A convinced monarchist, Voltaire reminds his readers that they are formed as nation by the spectacle of the king; monarchy confers upon them a unity of gaze and purpose, but it also assigns to them an active role as arbiters of taste in the theatre of the state. In presenting the age of Louis XIV as a distinctive and separate work of time's art (‘heureux ouvrage’, 619: 1753, I, 7), Voltaire breaks with traditional dynastic representations of monarchy, and suggests that the shared history of France is best approached through cultural rather than through political, legal or religious traditions. Voltaire's approach both reflects and accelerates the general desacralisation of the iconography of the French monarchy during the eighteenth century. The monarchy had not altogether lost its sacred and mystic aura by this time, but naturalistic images of the king had started to prevail over eucharistic models.⁴⁴ As a defender of strong kingship as a bulwark against both aristocratic power and the constitutional claims of the parlements, Voltaire wanted to do something more than simply revive old notions of the royal mystique du sang. His cultural defence of monarchy entails a polemical rejection of the traditional discourses of French politics, and enables him to postulate the existence within the state of a critical cultural sphere in which monarchy is both appreciated and regulated.

The background to Voltaire's cultural polemic is complex. Since the early sixteenth century, the debate about the French state had separated into two general strands: constitutionalist theories which posited that the king was subject to both the positive and fundamental laws of the kingdom, and absolutist theories in which the king is said not to be legally bound by any law, or only bound by fundamental laws.⁴⁵ These jurisprudential arguments often entailed a re-evaluation of the long-term impact of the occupation of Roman Gaul by the Franks, and the consequent relationship between France's heritage of Roman law and its Frankish, German legal tradition. All this had some affinities with and some bearing upon the elaboration of a common law interpretation of English history in seventeenth-century England.⁴⁶ The constitutionalist arguments had persisted throughout the seventeenth century. Louis XIV, however, did not require or encourage a juristic defence of his kingship, and preferred to associate himself with the idea of dynastic blood right (‘mystique du sang’).⁴⁷ With the resurgence of the influence of the parlements and the aristocracy during the Regency, juristic scholarship enjoyed the faint beginnings of a revival. The debate about the nature of the French constitution was reoriented towards the origins and nature of feudal custom and law. The constitutionalist argument was now largely appropriated by oppositional ‘Germanist’ theorists—proponents of a limited and mixed regime of king, parlements and nobility, in accordance with the best Frankish traditions. In 1727, the Comte de Boulainvilliers stated the Germanist-aristocratic case in its baldest form in his Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement de France; the Franks who had conquered Gaul had imposed an oligarchic constitution which eventually enshrined aristocratic feudalism as its system of government. The contemporary nobility and parlements continued to be, in this interpretation, essential parts of the machinery of the French constitution.

Royalists like Voltaire (who was much influenced by his friend the Marquis D'Argenson who circulated in manuscript the polemical ‘Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France’, c. 1739, but published in 1764), regarded the vestiges of aristocratic feudal jurisdictions in France as oppressive, and saw strong monarchy as the best means of maintaining equality among French subjects.⁴⁸ That the juristic, as opposed to the mystic case for absolute monarchy, was not ideologically bankrupt by the early eighteenth century is demonstrated by the popularity of Dubos' ‘Romanist’, royalist riposte to Boulainvilliers, the Histoire critique de l'établissement de la monarchie françoise dans les Gaules (1734).⁴⁹ In Dubos' account, the Franks are said to have acceded peacefully to Roman power in Gaul, taking over at the same time Roman laws, civility and the constitutional principle of allegiance to a single emperor or monarch. Feudalism is, in this version, a later usurpation of power by the nobility whose authority, therefore, has no legal basis in French history.

On the opposing side, it was the nobleman Montesquieu who ultimately gained respectability and currency for the Germanist-aristocratic thesis. His scholarly contribution to the debate was followed by the adoption of a Germanist outlook by the Encyclopédie, and a flourishing eighteenth-century tradition of aristocratic apologetics.⁵⁰ Montesquieu's analysis of the origins of the French constitution and feudal law in De l'Esprit des lois (books 28, 30, 31) is unusually sophisticated; he describes France as a state from its very origins a monarchy limited by the constitutional power of the nobility and their institutions, although he does concede that the rigours of aristocratic feudal power had, at various points in French history, become excessive. French legal history, in Montesquieu's reading, authorises a limited monarchy in which the nobility functions as an intermediate power (‘pouvoir intermédiaire’), and in which the parlements perform the role of repository of the laws (‘corps dépositaire des lois’).⁵¹ Thus, Montesquieu implies, there is a case for strengthening the role of the second estate and the parlements in the name of a wider, historically sanctioned tradition of French national liberty.

Voltaire's response to the Germanist/Romanist historical debate is somewhat contradictory. His accounts of early post-Roman France have a number of Romanist elements.⁵² Elsewhere, however, he insists that the Frankish barbarians completely destroyed the civilised urban culture which the Gauls had derived from Rome (Essai, I, 338). In 1753, yielding to a request from the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, Voltaire published a two-volume summary of the history of the Holy Roman Empire, the Annales de l'Empire, in which he gave serious attention to the question of the Frankish conquest of Gaul, and the subsequent establishment of the feudal system in France. Here, he explicitly refutes Dubos' ‘peaceful takeover’ thesis; the Franks are said to have overrun Gaul, and not to have been invited in as welcome successors to the Romans (‘non pas en alliés du peuple, comme on [i.e. Dubos] l'a prétendu, mais après avoir pillé les colonies romaines’).⁵³ In all these entanglements it is at least clear that Voltaire thought that the French civil state had improved over its history through the gradual social participation and power of the commons, in alliance with the sovereign against feudal structures and aristocratic privilege. This bourgeois-royalist narrative of history would later be endorsed, in different circumstances, by Voltaire's more scholarly successors in the Scottish Enlightenment. Montesquieu, as Voltaire realised, represented the most intelligent obstacle to this interpretation since he had successfully combined historical jurisprudence with a sociology of checks and balances. For this reason, in the Siècle, the Essai and in other works, Voltaire's objective was not so much to refute the Germanist-aristocratic thesis, as to rob it of all political significance.

In 1769, at the behest of Louis XV's Chancellor Maupeou, who was then engaged in a programme to bring the troublesome parlements to heel (and ultimately, in 1771, to suppress them), Voltaire published a Histoire du Parlement de Paris which, despite its royalist polemical bias, continued to insist on the fact of a Frankish invasion of Gaul.⁵⁴ Voltaire plundered Boulainvilliers' Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement for this work, as the annotations all over his surviving copies show.⁵⁵ The result is a surprisingly fair-minded history of the Paris parlement, but one which insists upon the discontinuity between the historical parlement and its modern successor institution. Even the word ‘parlement’ has changed its meaning beyond all recognition: ‘et les noms et les choses ont subi les mêmes vicissitudes’.⁵⁶ In all of Voltaire's accounts of the period, the constitution of medieval France is said to be nothing more than a licensed form of brigandage. He finds no legitimacy in any historical—juristic thesis whether Romanist or Germanist: ‘La jurisprudence était celle de la férocité et de la superstition’ (Essai, I, 339). In so far as Voltaire expounds a thèse royale in his reading of French history, it is one without juristic content.⁵⁷ The French sovereign is identified culturally with the urbanised world of the Roman Empire, and monarchy emerges, in Voltaire's reworking of Dubos, as the sign and achievement of civilisation.⁵⁸ Modernity and monarchy are thus seen as interdependent:

il est vrai que cet esprit philosophique qui a gagné presque toutes les conditions excepté le bas peuple, a beaucoup contribué à faire valoir les droits des souverains.

(Siècle de Louis XIV, 1001: added after 1753)

Voltaire's royalism has often been caricatured as a preference for ‘Enlightened despotism’. This notion erroneously implies that Voltaire naively supposed that good sovereigns are not limited but self-limiting, whereas, although Voltaire recognised no constituted intermediate powers in the French state—such as the nobility or the church—which might set legal limits to the power of the monarch, he did believe that the crown was, in practice, culturally rather than legally limited. Peter Gay sees Voltaire's liking for monarchy as pragmatic, a matter of geographical suitability in some states, though not necessarily in others.⁵⁹ René Pomeau regards Voltaire's royalism as a matter of doctrine based on a clear set of principles—‘l'antichristianisme, un activisme autoritaire, un humanisme libéral’—and on a conviction that nothing else can control France's factional, sectarian and feudal tendencies.⁶⁰ Neither interpretation rings entirely true for Voltaire's histories themselves which elaborate no doctrine of monarchy as such, but do articulate an aesthetic preference for monarchy, and a neoclassical vision of the sovereign imposing fixed rules and coherent form upon the state.⁶¹ Voltaire regards these rules or ‘positive laws’ as necessary social fictions; their legitimacy is not derived from tradition or nature, but from empirical observation of their tendency to civilise and promote justice.⁶² A general social ‘esprit philosophique’ and monarchy mutually advance each other. In the Siècle, Voltaire shows that Louis XIV was restrained in his actions by the very aesthetic understanding of politics which he had himself generated, and that it was this, rather than adherence to a constitution, which caused him to observe a regular system of laws. Voltaire thus situates himself within the tradition of state panegyric which Louis himself had fostered, but which had, in turn, strategically celebrated a system in which arbitrariness could have no place. (Voltaire himself wrote a panegyric poem to Louis XV after the French victory at Fontenoy in 1745).⁶³

MONTESQUIEU AND DESPOTISM

Voltaire fully appreciated the political dangers of presenting the French monarchy in an aestheticised way without any pleasing illusions about the legal constraints placed upon it. He acknowledged the troubling fact that there was no categorical difference between monarchy and despotism, and he once asked himself, ‘Où est la ligne qui sépare le gouvernement monarchique et le despotique?’; to this question, the only answer which Voltaire could supply was that the difference was largely a matter of style.⁶⁴ The question appears in Voltaire's Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois (1777), a compilation of many of his previous comments on Montesquieu, and culmination of years of reflection upon Montesquieu's generic distinctions between republics, monarchies and despotisms. Although direct contacts between the two men were limited, Montesquieu represented for Voltaire both an admired ally in the cause of justice and anti-clericalism, and a persistent imagined intellectual opponent.⁶⁵ Voltaire derived energy for his historical writing from his urge to refute what he saw as Montesquieu's hopelessly abstract sociology of laws by putting it to the test of history; all of his later histories, whether explicitly or implicitly, represent an engagement with L'Esprit des lois. In his intellectual opposition to Montesquieu, Voltaire would later come to represent an alternative strand of influence in British and American historiography.⁶⁶

In the Esprit des lois, Montesquieu begins with a taxonomy of the three basic forms of government (despotic, republican—both in its democratic and aristocratic forms—and monarchic); each form has a nature and an animating principle (fear, virtue and honour respectively). Voltaire persistently, even wilfully, misinterpreted this. He misunderstood Montesquieu's analysis of the principles of public behaviour in different types of government, and insisted that this should be replaced with strictly empirical questions (not ‘is virtue the category of political behaviour which enables the functioning of republican government?’ but ‘are people in republics in fact virtuous?’).⁶⁷ His notes and comments are full of objections to (what he sees as) Montesquieu's abstract and schematic account of political motivation, including a long footnote to the Siècle de Louis XIV (862-3: added after 1753). Voltaire especially disliked the caricature of eastern despotisms which provides the negative pole in Montesquieu's normative discourse of limited government. Voltaire pointed out, in the Essai and elsewhere, that the Ottoman system, in particular, though not conformable to Montesquieu's notion of tempered monarchy (‘gouvernement monarchique tempéré’), is nevertheless culturally limited in ways which he chooses to ignore (Essai, I, 833).⁶⁸

Book 19 of De l'Esprit des lois examines, in an innovatory way, the complex interrelationship between ‘mœurs’ (a term which includes customs, traditions and manners) and laws. This discussion, as chapter 16 previously explains, is predicated upon a distinction between man's dual role as a citizen (regulated by laws) and as a private individual (influenced by custom). Voltaire points out in La Défense de mon oncle (1767), written as a vindication of La Philosophie de l'Histoire, that such a distinction is artificial, since the effectiveness of the laws of any society depends upon more general patterns of cultural behaviour: ‘Le vrai savant est celui … qui juge d'une nation par ses mœurs plus que par ses lois, parce que les lois peuvent être bonnes et les mœurs mauvaises.’⁶⁹ Law is a matter of ‘opinion’ (‘l'opinion a fait les lois’), and by ‘opinion’ Voltaire means the sum total of what a society believes about itself (‘Remarques’, Essai, II, 935). This is a relatively participatory view of law-making, and it provides Voltaire with another explanation as to how monarchy can be limited de facto as well as de jure: ‘Il y a partout un frein imposé au pouvoir arbitraire, par la loi, par les usages, ou par les mœurs’ (Essai, II, 809). Voltaire responds to Montesquieu's sociology of laws with his own idea of an ‘esprit du temps’ or ‘esprit général’ which dissolves the boundary, in a way the Esprit des lois does not, between institutional structures and the activities of society at large. Voltaire reckons all institutional arrangements to be customary, facilitated by particular habits (‘usages’), and by the current state of the collective ‘esprit général’. Changes in custom and taste, as the Essai sur les mœurs would later argue at some length, are thus key indicators of historical development.

PERFECTION POSTPONED

The Siècle de Louis XIV incorporates a theory of culturally limited monarchy articulated in more detail elsewhere in Voltaire's writings. This theory challenges contemporary legal-historical as well as abstract sociological descriptions of the French constitution in the name of a type of egalitarian royalism. It also embodies an implicit claim for the authority of the historian who addresses political rulers from the very cultural domain in which their power is legitimated. The historian both shapes the national past into an artistic whole, and engages in the second-order creation of a role for aesthetics in politics. In the Siècle de Louis XIV, the national past is subjected to a further tier of evaluation as, with each stage of revision, the author superimposes a more self-consciously international perspective. Although the identification of a cosmopolitan ‘esprit philosophique’ with the age of Louis XIV is a feature of the earlier texts, later revisions suggest a growing tendency to see the seventeenth century as part of a much longer progress of civilisation, especially when the work is eventually appended to the Essai in later editions of the collected works.⁷⁰ The closure and formal perfection of the age of Louis XIV is, in all texts, slightly compromised by the bathos of the last chapter which treats of acrimonious seventeenth-century disputes about the alleged atheism of the Chinese. This absurdity is cited as an example of the degree to which the public rationality, or an ‘esprit philosophique’ still needed to develop (267: 1753, II, 336).

Further revisions to the text indicate Voltaire's growing interest in religious strife as an obstacle to the period's attempts at modernisation. The chapters on religious affairs dramatise a conflict between an ‘esprit raisonable’, characteristic of the age at its best, and a wilfully anachronistic ‘esprit dogmatique’ bedevilling different groups of sectarians. In this section of the work, Voltaire is often obliged to postpone rather than to celebrate the modernity he wishes to locate in the age of Louis XIV. Jansenism makes an appearance as a backward-looking and fanatical form of sectarianism, and Voltaire finds this variant of Catholicism, not fundamentally incompatible with civil order, but embarrassing to a rational state. In the closing sections of the Siècle (which cover the period shortly after Louis XIV's reign), there is a passage relating how, in 1725, Jansenist enthusiasts disgraced themselves by going into a frenzy over supposed ‘miracles’ at the tomb of a revered Jansenist deacon; Voltaire loftily declares such fanaticism outmoded if harmless:

Ces sottises auraient eu des suites sérieuses dans des temps moins éclairés. Il semblait que ceux qui les protégaient ignorassent à quel siècle ils avaient affaire.

(1087: 1753, II, 310)

The modernity of the age of Louis XIV is more seriously called into question by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had guaranteed Protestant toleration in France), the repression of the Protestants which preceded it, and the Protestant revolt in the Cévennes which followed. Voltaire is fascinated and appalled by the disastrously inflexible character both of the French Protestants and of the Jesuit-inspired repressive action of the state. Although he carefully distances Louis XIV from personal responsibility for the state oppression, Voltaire finds on both sides a failure of Enlightenment, and a perverse unwillingness to subordinate religious to civil interests. The Huguenots' demand for political autonomy seems to him seditious and unreasonable (their ‘esprit dogmatique’ inevitably engenders an ‘esprit republicain’). He finds the Huguenots anachronistic in their unsocial asceticism: ‘Les fêtes magnifiques d'une cour galante jetaient même de ridicule sur le pédantisme des huguenots’ (1048-9: 1753, II, 246). State oppression, too, is an anachronistic act, aggravated by the ultramontane proselytising of Louis' Jesuit advisers. The ironic consequence of this intolerance is the exodus from the country of a vast pool of expertise in arts and manufacturing, causing still further delays in the country's process of modernisation. The age of reason now appears to be some way off: ‘Cette raison … est un des grands ouvrages du temps, et ce temps n'était pas encore venu’ (1063: added after 1753). Here, for the first time, Voltaire finds a dark correlation (never fully articulated in any of the texts of the Siècle) between the artistic perfections of Louis XIV's state and its cruelty:

On voyait alors des scènes bien différentes: d'un côté, le désespoir et la fuite d'une partie de la nation; de l'autre, de nouvelles fêtes à Versailles; Trianon et Marly bâtis; la nature forcée dans tous ces lieux de délices, et des jardins où l'art était épuisé.

(930-1: 1753, II, 68)

Voltaire is usually more indulgent towards ceremonial display in the high places of Louis XIV's France, but here he detects culpable shallowness in its oblivious baroque artistry.

For the most part, the Siècle de Louis XIV converts history into a spectacle discontinuous with the natural order. Under the subsequent, less dazzling administrations of Fleury in France and Walpole in Britain, affairs return to their natural order (‘Les affaires politiques rentrèrent insensiblement dans leur ordre naturel’, 886: 1753, I, 471). The sequel to this work, the Précis du Siècle de Louis XV (1769), documents this ‘natural order’ of history in a largely unembellished account of events from the death of Louis XIV to the present.⁷¹ Throughout the work, Voltaire applies a detached cosmopolitan perspective to recent events in his country. Once again, French history is analysed within a broad European context, and again French modernity is compromised by anachronistic episodes—in this case, the stabbing of Louis XV by the Jansenist fanatic Damiens, and the romanticised Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.⁷² Some of the most significant achievements of the period are said to have taken place during the financial revolution of the Regency; even John Law's catastrophic financial system is said to have had beneficial long-term effects upon monetary and commercial behaviour (‘un système tout chimérique enfanta un commerce réel’, 1307). The era of Louis XV is one of relative artistic decline. Voltaire expresses the conventionally neoclassical fear that, once the nation's language and the arts have been perfected in one epoch, they will inevitably be corrupted in the next: ‘La langue fut portée, sous Louis XIV, au plus haut point de perfection dans tous les genres … Il est à craindre aujourd'hui que cette belle langue ne dégénère, par cette malheureuse facilité d'écrire que le siècle passé a donnée aux siècles suivants’ (1570). The rehearsal of neoclassical ideas of declension in the chapter entitled ‘Des Progrès de l'esprit humain dans le siècle de Louis XV’, has led some critics to assume that the work's predecessor, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, should be read as a satirical commentary on the twilight period in which Voltaire was living. However, since both ancients and moderns had recognised a distinction between the arts and other aspects of progress, and, since Voltaire had shown the great epoch of Louis XIV to have been an exceptional case within the normative evolution of the philosophical spirit of mankind, such inferences are not necessary.⁷³

THE NARRATIVE OF EUROPE

Voltaire's most ambitious historical work, the Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l'histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à Louis XIII (this title was first used in 1769) supplies the wider historical context within which the account of the age of Louis XV is to be understood. The Essai explores the complex, and sometimes contradictory relationship between the arts, the philosophical spirit, and the evolution of civilisation in Europe. Moreover, it attempts to do so in ways which will erode national partialities; local cultural achievements such as the Siècle de Louis XIV, which was appended to this work, appear as (particularly impressive) variations on the theme of international evolution. Despite its declared ambition to supply an overview of the development of civilisation, the Essai is essentially an agglomeration of a number of national histories held together by a (sometimes fragile) narrative thread. At the outset, Voltaire approaches them as he might a collection of national epic poems, identifying a small number of constant formal elements and many national variants. The unity of these national histories, Voltaire explains in the summary ‘Résumé de toute cette histoire’ (1756), is to be found, not at the level of master narrative, but in the pre-cognitive drive to civilisation inherent in all men and women:

Au milieu de ces saccagements et de ces destructions que nous observons dans l'espace de neuf cent années, nous voyons un amour de l'ordre qui anime en secret le genre humain, et qui a prévenu sa ruine totale. C'est un des ressorts de la nature, qui reprend toujours sa force: c'est lui qui a formé le code des nations.

(II, 808: 1756, XVI, 149)

Man's creative love of order, which has affinities with the historian's own artistic quest for form in variety, fashions and sustains the delicate and slow process of civilisation: ‘Il est aisé de … conclure … avec quelle lenteur la raison humaine se forme’ (II, 87: 1756, XII, 315). The Essai does not, as is often supposed, sound the drum of the march of reason. When Voltaire speaks of progress, he uses the very unusual unreflexive verb ‘se civiliser’ to signify that the civilising process is voluntary and not mechanical: ‘Avec quelle lenteur, avec quelle difficulté le genre humain se civilise, et la société se perfectionne!’ (II, 724: 1756, XIV, 231). The process is silent, whereas the forces of destruction and regression are associated with noise: ‘Le commerce et l'industrie de ces villes a réparé sourdement le mal que les princes [Edward III and Philippe de Valois] faisaient avec tant de fracas’ (my italics, I, 721: 1756, XII, 125).

Voltaire's complementary task as a creative historian is to piece together remnants of order in an often chaotic past, and to reveal the constant elements in history while revelling in the infinite diversity of peoples and ages. In the ‘Résumé’ (1756) of the Essai, Voltaire explains that this simultaneous search for order and variety springs from the contrasting functions in history of nature and custom:

L'empire de la coûtume est bien plus vaste que celui de la nature; il s'étend sur les mœurs, sur tous les usages; il répand la variété sur la scene de l'univers: la nature y répand l'unité; elle établit partout un petit nombre de principes invariables: ainsi le fonds est partout le même, et la culture produit des fruits divers.

(1756, II, 810)

Voltaire's second major history is, then, in part, an essai in Montaigne's sense of the word: a detached, often sceptical and episodic evaluation of the cultural eccentricities and natural propensities of mankind.⁷⁴ Yet the Essai also transcends the Renaissance preoccupation with peculiar human customs in its search for a coherent narrative of the development of European civilisation in relation to the rest of the world. This narrative is secured in Voltaire's idea of nature and natural law, although this, in turn, derives from a precarious metaphysic which history puts to the test. With each new revision of the text of the Essai, Voltaire runs increasing epistemological difficulties, and he confesses himself unable to shore up the work against the old, familiar pyrrhonian enemy. Nevertheless, he persists in his original aim of supplying his readers with a normative historical perspective from which to re-evaluate national, and, ultimately, European diversities and prejudices.

THE ESSAI SUR LES MœURS

Originally a response to his mistress's request for a history which eschewed mere chronology of kings and queens, the Essai eventually grew into a grand summary of world history from the time of Charlemagne to the dawn of the age of Louis XIV. In the 1769 Geneva edition of his works, Voltaire placed at the front of the Essai a preliminary discourse on the natural history of primitive societies entitled La Philosophie de l'histoire. This work, the first ever to use the term ‘the philosophy of history’, makes explicit many of the themes of nature and natural law in the Essai, although its presence also overmagnifies their importance to the Essai as a whole. Voltaire began work on the Essai in the 1740s, publishing portions of the chapters on the crusades in the early 1750s. The first authorised text appeared in 1754, and the work reached its basic form in the edition printed in the 1756 Geneva works under the title Essay sur l'histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations. I shall base my interpretation upon this edition, noting the successive revisions of 1761, 1769, 1775, as well as those which appeared in the posthumous ‘Kehl’ edition of 1785.⁷⁵ Modern critics, basing their readings upon the Kehl edition, have tended to assume that the Essai was conceived as a militantly ironic exposure of human folly and cruelty in history.⁷⁶ In its 1754-6 incarnations, the Essai is not, as is generally supposed, a Candide-like satire on human depravity writ large, but a developmental narrative which tells calmly of the material and cultural changes which brought about the rise of modern European societies out of the ruins of feudalism. Although Voltaire polemically dissociates the modern world from the medieval, he does not simply consign the Middle Ages to darkness, but shows that they, too, undergo a transformational process set in motion by the growth of towns, the (generally benign) influence of the Church, and the trauma of the Crusades. The rise of a civilised European system of states comes about through the establishment of powerful monarchies, and the eventual decline in the influence of the Church and the nobility. Voltaire's concept of world history is quite generous, embracing the Middle and Far East, though rarely Africa. Nevertheless, the narrative largely follows the trajectory of Europe and the triumph of its norms within an international framework. Although Voltaire describes other civilisations as they develop in ways wholly independent of Europe, his narrative shifts of perspective are usually strategic manœuvres in which Europe remains his main subject. It was this, only sporadically ironic, account of the rise of modern Europe which was read, translated and reviewed throughout Britain and North America, and which shaped international opinion of Voltaire as a historian. Gibbon, Robertson and Hume read and absorbed the early versions of the Essai long before a more bitterly satirical, older Voltaire had reshaped the text into a more blatant contest between reason and unreason.

The Essai provided its readers with the outlines of an Enlightenment narrative of the rise of Europe; many of its essential features would later be elaborated by British and American historians attempting to construct a satisfactory history of their own civilisation. The story of the Essai opens in China and India. The initial perspective is widened before the narrative proper begins with the reign of Charlemagne (not, in Voltaire's view, a golden age), and a backward glance at the destruction of the Roman Empire. Voltaire, like the Gibbon of the notorious chapters 15 and 16 of The Decline and Fall, identifies Christianity as a major cause of the weakening and collapse of the Roman Empire. As the narrative travels through the chaos of the early Middle Ages, Voltaire shows the Church gradually grasping at power. On balance, however, he sees this institution as a force for civilisation (‘on sentait qu'elle … était faite pour donner des leçons aux autres’), and even as a kind of intermediate power in the states where it operates (‘un frein qui retienne les souverains’, I, 492, 529: 1756, XI, 263, 306). The Crusades and the ravages of Genghis Khan form part of a post-classical pattern of barbarian incursions world-wide. In this context, the Crusades are merely the last explosion of barbarian restlessness, temporarily disrupting the underlying tendency of European societies, from the thirteenth century onwards, towards synthesis, civility and urbanisation. The rigours of aristocratic and church-sponsored forms of feudalism are steadily attenuated as chivalry harmonises social relations and monarchy gains ground. By the fourteenth century, in Italy and elsewhere, municipal incorporation has led to advances in the arts and sciences, and to the recovery of natural rights lost during the destruction of the Roman Empire: ‘les hommes ne rentrèrent que par degrés et très difficilement dans leur droit naturel’ (I, 777: 1756, XII, 187). The cultivated civil society of the Ottoman Empire during this period holds out future possibilities for Europe.

By the early sixteenth century, monarchy is on a secure footing throughout the western and eastern worlds, and this, along with the increased wealth and stability brought by burgeoning commercial activity in the towns, leads to greater and more centralised internal order in the states, as well as increases in the technical sophistication and cost of warfare (II, 163-5: 1756, XIII, 36-9). This is accompanied by a cluster of artistic achievements (the word ‘Renaissance’ was not in use in the eighteenth century), reaching a crescendo in François I's France, which are, however, partly overshadowed by religious strife. Religious turmoil, in turn, has its origins in the gap, which had been widening since the early fifteenth century, between the learned and hence powerful clergy, and the intellectually disadvantaged laity (I, 69: 1756, XII, 98). Paradoxically, then, it is when clerical learning and power are at their height, during the papacy of Leo X, that Luther first lifts a corner of the veil which has shrouded the populace in ignorance (II, 217: 1756, XIII, 94). The ‘monument’ of the Church of Rome totters under the weight of this last straw (II, 251: 1756, XIII, 125). The Reformation is the ideological fruition of long gestated passions. Voltaire betrays a mild distaste for the somewhat buffoon-like Luther, and argues that, with hindsight, even legitimate resistance to the tyranny of Rome was not worth all the subsequent years of religious war in Europe. The discoveries and colonial enterprises in the Americas, which would be discussed at greater length in later editions of the Essai, are given brief, ironic presentation as further evidence of this persistent streak of barbarity in the Europe of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The effect of the Reformation is to loosen the bonds of civil order established earlier in the sixteenth century. The ensuing disorder culminates (at least, to a French way of thinking) in the St Bartholomew Massacre, and again in the assassination of Henri IV of France. Even in the earliest texts of the Essai, Voltaire emphasises that Europe at this time is in the grip of an epidemic of irrational hatred (‘fureur épidémique’), and public life has become a bizarre mixture of polish and fanaticism (‘mélange de galanterie et de fureurs’); none of this can be said to represent an advance on the previous century (II, 541, 494: 1756, XII, 364, 281). The English, who have enriched their country through commerce, and redistributed some of their wealth, belatedly suffer a civil war along the lines of the continental religious wars (II, 466, 661: 1756, XIII, 328; XIV, 156).

By the sixteenth century, Voltaire starts to refer to the ‘esprit’ of the people (at this stage, it is generally one of fanaticism). As the seventeenth century unfolds, an ‘esprit général’ begins to evolve among the European nations. The emergence of this general spirit, however capricious and ill educated it may be, brings with it the prospect of more participatory kinds of societies in which public opinion and cultural priorities play a shaping role. By the later seventeenth century, commerce has enhanced the political role of the ‘esprit’ of the people, and the world seems, quite suddenly, to have outgrown religious wars. For England, this is a period of real cultural achievement: ‘L'esprit de la nation acquit sous la règne de Charles II une réputation immortelle, quoique le gouvernement n'en eût point’ (II, 689: 1756, XIV, 190). Rome, during the Counter-Reformation, and Holland, in its golden age, reach similar cultural heights. The European portion of the Essai ends with France poised to undergo a great expansion of national spirit in the age of Louis XIV. The history closes with the rejection of Christianity by China and Japan, while Persia and the Ottoman empire echo the cultural advances of the age.

Voltaire allocates a considerable amount of textual space to events outside western Europe. These, although they cannot be seen as mere tricks of perspective, function primarily as a referential framework within which the apparently normative character of the rise of the West is both comprehended and rendered problematic. Voltaire's accounts of other, non-western civilisations are appreciative, but not fully developmental. China is a particularly curious case, representing both a utopia and—since it is a society which has advanced as far as it can go—a haunting image of cultural atrophy (I, 216: 1756, XI, 19). What puzzles Voltaire is that Europe, unlike China, seems able to perpetuate its own processes of advancement, yet, with its frantic missionary and colonial activities, it lacks the Chinese genius for self-sufficiency. In praising the great isolationist civilisations, China and Japan (who finally banish Europe from their midst at the very end of the Essai), Voltaire attacks the greed of Europe, and its perverse desire to transmit its culture to other parts of the globe:

Nos peuples occidentaux ont fait éclater dans toutes ces découvertes une grande supériorité d'esprit et de courage sur les notions orientales … Mais la nature leur avait donné sur nous un avantage qui balance tous les nôtres: c'est qu'elles n'avaient nul besoin de nous, et que nous avions besoin d'elles.

(II, 325: 1756, XIII, 207)

Many of Voltaire's non-western chapters (especially those on the Spanish depredations in the Americas) are similarly instrumental to his moral message that the East—a world in which stasis and isolation, rather than furious activity and cultural interaction, are the norms—is essential to the self-understanding of the West.

Voltaire's self-reflexivity also informs the European portions of the narrative where he is, on occasion, suspicious of his own tendency to seek out signs of cultural sophistication and civility, and wary of the imaginative seductions of periods simultaneously glittering and barbaric (for example, II, 494: 1756, XIII, 364). He is enthralled and horrified by the courts of François I and the Emperor Charles V which are at once chivalric, courteous and violently factious. In a final revision, he remarks: ‘Cette politesse brillait même au milieu des crimes: c'était une robe d'or et de soie ensanglantée’ (II, 135). Despite such frissons, Voltaire stops well short of the kind of critique of the moral snares of civilisation which Jean Jacques Rousseau mounted around the same time.⁷⁷ At bottom, Voltaire sees no actual connivance between aesthetic and inhumane pursuits, and he objected to this strain in the argument of the Discours sur … l'inegalité in a letter to Rousseau himself: ‘Avouez que le badinage de Marot n'a pas produit La St Barthélemi, et que la tragédie du Cid ne causa pas les guerres de la Fronde.’⁷⁸

REVISION

With his perception of his own artistic practice sharpened by Rousseau, Voltaire remained acutely aware of the moral difficulties of salvaging an artistically coherent narrative from the past without giving up to irony a sense of progress in European history. There are moments of savage irony—the sections on the Crusades and the New World discoveries, for instance—but these are contained and absorbed within the larger developmental structure. After 1756, the text of the Essai was substantially expanded, with new information and evidence, and also with added remarks and asides, many of these acerbic, satirical, and suggestive of growing doubts about the inherent value of history.⁷⁹ These revisions reveal a changing Voltaire, more inclined to subordinate history to his moral crusade against ‘l'infâme’, more pessimistic about human nature, and more virulently hostile to the clergy. In the last quarter century of his literary career, Voltaire showed a new preference for shorter textual formats as vehicles for effective propaganda. Accordingly, many of the revisions to the Essai have the effect of reducing long developmental sections to sharp, arresting anecdote, and breaking the evolutionary thrust of the narrative. For example, in the 1756 text, he argues that, throughout the Middle Ages, fundamental changes occurred in Europe which steadily increased the sum of human liberty. However, in a textual revision of 1769, he supplements this with a remark that, even by the late fifteenth century, very little had actually happened to mitigate the barbarousness of the times: ‘Les mœurs ne furent pas meilleurs ni en France, ni en Angleterre, ni en Allemagne, ni dans le Nord. La barbarie, la superstition, l'ignorance couvraient la face du monde, excepté en Italie’ (II, 10). Gradually, Voltaire comes to see the Middle Ages as the opposite, rather than the precursor of modern Europe.

Later texts tend to distil the ironic character of individual episodes in history. Even when discussing the Crusades, already characterised as an absurd, futile act of fanaticism, Voltaire intensifies, in a revision of 1761, the irony of the crusaders' attack on Constantinople: ‘Ainsi les chrétiens dirigèrent leur croisade contre le premier prince de la chrétienté’ (I, 581). The narrative is constantly undercut by these new verbal flounces about the futility of it all; François I's France is suddenly dismissed as barbarous, and humanists such as Pico della Mirandola are now held up for ridicule as examples of the blind ignorance of Renaissance Italy (II, 202 (1769); II, 89 (1761)). With each incremental set of revisions, the satirist steadily gets the better of the historian. The historical narrative of the Essai is subtly remoulded into a contest between the archetypes of reason and fanaticism. In another instance of this process, Voltaire originally attributed the desire of the crusaders to crusade to religious prejudice, avarice and restlessness; in 1761, however, this behaviour is redescribed in archetypal terms: ‘Cette fureur épidémique parut alors pour la première fois, afin qu'il n'y eût aucun fléau possible qui n'eût affligé l'espèce humaine’ (I, 560).

As he retouched the Essai, Voltaire became more preoccupied with the ironies of causality in history, and less interested in its (ultimately relatively civilised) outcome. Narrative connectives are traded for a satirical sense of necessity. The rudimentary causal coherence, which Voltaire originally found in the history of the world, starts to look like a Panglossian fantasy. Voltaire now sees only an unpredictable game of consequences (the word he uses to convey this is ‘enchaînement’). François I's death of the new world disease, syphilis, is presented, in 1761, as an example of this ironically treacherous ‘enchaînement’:

C'est ainsi que les événements sont enchaînés: un pilote génois donne un univers à l'Espagne; la nature a mis dans les îles de ces climats lointains un poison qui infecte les sources de la vie; et il faut qu'un roi de France en périsse.

(II, 201)

The term ‘enchaînement’ conveys an idea of human helplessness in the face of meaningless fatality: ‘il paraît un enchaînement fatal des causes qui entrainent les hommes comme les vents poussent les sables et les flots’ (II, 794: 1756, XIV, 319). The use of the term ‘enchaînement’ also carries with it an indirect attack on Catholic providential history of the kind most famously exemplified by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681). Bossuet uses the term ‘enchaînement’ to denote the divine order in which God simulates logical cause-effect relationships in order to give man a sense of the moral intelligibility of the world. Or as Bossuet phrases it:

ce mesme Dieu qui a fait l'enchaisnement de l'Univers … a voulu aussi que le cours des choses humaines eust sa suite et ses proportions.⁸⁰

Voltaire's use of the word ‘enchaînement’ suggests a parodic reworking of theocentric universal history. Bossuet's God, by acting directly upon human passions, produces a historical order identical to the providential order, whereas Voltaire's ‘enchaînement’ reveals a moral sequence discontinuous with or in ironic relation to the historical one.⁸¹

EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ONCE AGAIN

With each revised stage of the Essai, the balance of authority shifts away from history and towards the narrator who submits his material to his own rational and moral mediation. In 1756, Voltaire had acknowledged that a selective evaluation of the past would deprive some parts of history of their significance: ‘vous attachant toujours aux événements et aux mœurs, vous franchissez tous ces espaces vides pour venir aux temps marquées par de grandes choses’ (II, 785: 1756, XIV, 308). As later versions of the Essai metamorphose history into moral typology, the past seems to lack content; it oscillates between empty spaces (‘espaces vides’) and moments of moral illumination. The additional moralising and satiric asides bestow only sporadic and contingent value upon the content of history, and Voltaire appears to have reverted to the epistemological preoccupations of his youth. His partial solution to the problem was, in 1769, to prefix to the Essai an anthropological study of early human civilisations, La Philosophie de l'histoire. This innovative pseudo-history of man in the ancient world identifies the natural and constant aspects of human behaviour with regard to language, social interaction and religious belief.⁸² Originally published separately in 1765, La Philosophie provides, in its new position, a comprehensive statement on the natural determinants of human civilisation as a kind of theoretical underpinning for the history of variations in human custom in the Essai. Nevertheless, La Philosophie and the Essai need to be read separately if Voltaire's ideas of history are not be subordinated to his mechanist sociology of early man. This need for separate reading is, at one level, implicit in the distinction which Voltaire makes in La Philosophie between nascent (or natural) reason and cultivated reason. He evaluates primitive societies according to how far they have realised natural, moral and rational human potentialities. All societies progress from primitive reason (‘raison commencée’) to advanced reason (‘raison cultivée’) through a sequence of religious and political forms: at the religious level, from intuitive monotheism, to superstitious polytheism, and then to sophisticated monotheist belief in a rewarding and punishing god; at the political level, from theocracy to republicanism or monarchy.⁸³ In advancing cultures, cultivated reason brings an unconscious return to the intuitions of primitive reason; this, for example is the essence of the achievement of ancient Greece and Rome.⁸⁴ By representing reason as a potentiality released through personal and collective development, Voltaire tries to put history back on a semi-empirical footing. Even so, the historical twist which he gives to natural moral law, does not, finally, enable him to extricate this work from the mechanistic and uniform character of his youthful Newtonianism.

The later texts of the Essai continue to preserve a degree of emphasis upon human diversity and unpredictability. Natural impulses are, Voltaire argues, the foundation of ethical behaviour throughout the world (do as you would be done by, do not steal from your neighbour, respect your parents, and so on), but this is not, as he reiterates at the end of La Philosophie, an adequate basis for a historical study of different cultures.⁸⁵ Even in this theoretical work, he stresses the discontinuity between moral laws which are naturally intuited (‘lois … naturelles, communes à tous’) and political laws which are artificial, arbitrary (‘lois purement civiles, éternellement arbitraires’), and best judged according to their social utility (a pragmatism closer to Hume than to Newton).⁸⁶ Nature, since it is incapable of modification, is a condition of stability; human variety and identities are culturally generated. Even in La Philosophie de l'histoire, perhaps the most mechanistic of his writings on human history, Voltaire allows room for a cultural history of individual and national variety, and for difference at the level of manners, customs and positive laws. The movement of Voltaire's historical concerns away from the political and cultural towards ethical and metaphysical questions is consistent with a general shift in his public persona during this period. From his years as a courtier and socialite in Paris and Berlin, through a period of crisis, and a recuperation of dignity and moral authority at Ferney, Voltaire's personal preoccupations had changed enormously. His early cosmopolitanism, which reflected both his social aspirations and his affection for modern European civilisation, gave way to a universalism of humanitarian concern. The ethical preoccupations of La Philosophie de l'histoire and the later texts of the two major histories are of a piece with his public campaigns for the Calas family, Sirven and La Barre. More than any other historian in this study, Voltaire projected himself as the final signified of his own works. The authority of this extra-textual self correlates with the defiant stylishness of these histories; his style is offered as evidence of civility, an exemplary act of aesthetic ordering by the autonomous and self-aware ‘esprit philosophique’ of its creator. For this reason, perhaps, Voltaire's personality proved and continues to prove more seductive to his French, British and American readers than the brand of cultural history which he invented.

Notes

1. All citations in the notes from the collected works of Voltaire refer either to Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (52 vols.; Paris, 1877-85) [hereafter Moland] or, where texts are available, to The Complete Works of Voltaire (Institut et Musée Voltaire, Geneva, 1968- in progress) (hereafter Works). All citations which refer to the letters of Voltaire are from Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Theodore Besterman, Works, LXXXV-CXXXV (1968-77), hereafter Best. D.

   All citations in the text of this chapter from L'Histoire de Charles XII are from Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1957). This text is taken from the ‘Kehl’ edition, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (70 vols.; Kehl, 1774-89), and differences between this and earlier texts are noted. All citations from Le Siècle de Louis XIV, from the Précis du Siècle de Louis XV, and from the Histoire de l'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand are also from the Pomeau edition of the Oeuvres historiques. These texts are also based on the ‘Kehl’ edition. Citations from the Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations are taken from the edition of René Pomeau (2 vols.; Paris, 1963). This text is based on the ‘Kehl’ edition. In all cases, textual differences in earlier editions will be noted and discussed. Citations from La Philosophie de l'histoire are from the edition by J. H. Brumfitt in Works, LIX (1969). This is based upon the separately published edition (Amsterdam (Geneva), 1765). Spelling in all of the above twentieth-century editions is given in modern form.

   Bibliographical details are drawn from Georges Bengesco, Voltaire: bibliographie de ses oeuvres (4 vols.; Paris, 1882-90). This must be supplemented by Theodore Besterman, ‘Some Eighteenth-Century Voltaire Editions unknown to Bengesco’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 64 (1968), 7-150. The first three volumes of the new, multi-volume biography of Voltaire are invaluable guides to the ‘historical’ period of his writing life. These are: René Pomeau, D'Arouet à Voltaire, 1694-1734 (Oxford, 1985); René Vaillot, Avec Mme du Châtelet, 1734-1749 (Oxford, 1988); René Pomeau, Christiane Mervaud et al., De la Cour au Jardin, 1750-1759 (Oxford, 1991).

   The journal Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century is here after cited as SVEC.

2. For an exhaustive study of the popularity of Voltaire's histories and other works in Britain, see A. M. Rousseau, ‘L'Angleterre et Voltaire, SVEC, 145-6 (1976).

3. J. H. Brumfitt's Voltaire, Historian (Oxford, 1958, revised, 1970) is still the fullest study of his historical works.

4. Vaillot, Avec Mme du Châtelet, 246-7.

5. For a very different kind of attempt to rehabilitate Voltaire's histories, see Freidrich Meinecke Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York, 1972).

6. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (revised edn, Berkeley, California, 1979); Blandine Barret-Kreigel, La défaite de l'érudition (Paris, 1988).

7. Haydn Mason, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire (Oxford, 1963).

8. On this shift, see Günther Pflug, ‘The Development of Historical Method in the Eighteenth Century’, History and Theory, 11 Beiheft (1971), 1-23.

9. On this debate, see Carlo Borghero, La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, Pirronismo e Conoscenza Storica (Milan, 1993), 357-75.

10. Nicholas Fréret, ‘Réflexions sur l'étude des anciennes histoires, et sur le degré de leurs preuves’, Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, VI (Paris, 1717), VI (1729), 146-89. The whole debate is printed in this volume.

11. ‘Sur M. Locke’, Lettres philosophiques (1734), Moland, XXII, 122.

12. For example, Le Philosophe ignorant (1766), Works, LXII (1987), 86.

13. ‘Le Pyrrhonisme de l'histoire’ (1768), Moland, XXVII, 235.

14. In the article ‘Histoire’, Voltaire mentions ‘l'histoire naturelle, improprement dite histoire, … qui est une partie essentielle de la physique’ (Works, XXXIII, 164).

15. Voltaire to Pierre Joseph Thoulier d'Olivet (6 January, 1736), Best. D980. See Andrée Mansau, Saint-Réal et l'humanisme cosmopolite (Paris, 1976), 440-2. Voltaire later remarked that, for all his merits, Saint-Réal was not really a historian: Voltaire to Pierre Jean Grosley (22 January, 1758), Best. D7599.

16. David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963); Blandine Barret-Kreigel, Jean Mabillon (Paris, 1988).

17. Jean Mabillon, Annales Ordinis S. Benedicti Occidentalium Monachorum Patriarchae (6 vols.; Paris, 1703-39). See, in particular, the Praefatii to volume II (1704) and volume III (1706).

18. Chantal Grell, L'histoire entre érudition et philosophie: étude sur la connaissance historique à l'âge des lumières (Paris, 1993).

19. On French national history in this period, see Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982); Erica Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1983), 129-79.

20. Gabriel Daniel, Histoire de France depuis l'Etablissement de la monarchie Française dans les Gaules (3 vols.; Paris, 1713), I, i; I, xiv. For a different view of Mézeray, see Phyllis K. Leffler, ‘From Humanist to Enlightenment Historiography: A Case Study of François Eudes de Mézeray’, French Historical Studies, 10 (1977-8), 416-38.

21. N. Boileau-Despréaux, L'Art poétique (1674), R. Le Bossu, Traité du poëme épique (1675), and Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l'esprit (Paris, 1687). The classic secondary study is René Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris, 1927); see also, Gordon Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neoclassicism (Cambridge, 1980).

22. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 50-1.

23. Voltaire, An Essay upon the civil wars of France, extracted from curious Manuscripts, and also upon the epick poetry of the European nations from Homer down to Milton (London, 1727). On this, see also David Williams, ‘Voltaire's “True Essay” on Epic Poetry’, Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), 46-57.

24. Grell, L'histoire entre érudition et philosophie, 219.

25. Voltaire, La Henriade, ed. O. R. Taylor, Works, II, (1970). David Maskell, The Historical Epic in France, 1500-1700 (Oxford, 1973).

26. Essay upon the epick (1727), 122-3.

27. See also O. R. Taylor, ‘Voltaire's Apprenticeship as a Historian: La Henriade’ in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, eds. W. H. Barber, J. H. Brumfitt, R. A. Leigh, R. Shackleton and S. S. B. Taylor (Edinburgh, 1967).

28. Henry Fielding (trans.), The military history of Charles XII. King of Sweden, written by the express order of his Majesty, by G. Adlerfeld (3 vols.; London, 1740). The view of L'Histoire de Charles XII as mock epic has been expressed in sophisticated ways by Lionel Gossman, ‘Voltaire's Charles XII: History into Art’, SVEC, 25 (1963), 691-720; Hayden White, Metahistory, 62-4; Suzanne Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1984), 57-94.

29. Samuel Johnson, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, line 220 in Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (New Haven, 1964).

30. Gearhart, The Open Boundary, 76.

31. In the 1739 Amsterdam edition of L'Histoire de Charles XII, Voltaire added a section at the end of book I on Peter's reforms in Russia.

32. Défense de Louis XIV (1769), Oeuvres historiques, 1294.

33. Grell, L'historie entre érudition et philosophie, 44-9.

34. Charles Perrault, ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand’ (delivered 1687) printed in volume I of Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (4 vols.; Paris, 1688-97).

35. The classic account is Hippolyte Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 1856). The most important recent account of the debate in England contains a good deal of information about France: Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, New York, 1991).

36. Antoine Houdart de la Motte, ‘Discours sur Homère’ (1713), Oeuvres (11 vols.; Paris, 1753-4), I; Jean Terrasson, Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade d'Homère (2 vols.; Paris, 1715).

37. ‘Nouvelles considérations sur l'histoire’ (1744), Oeuvres historiques, 46-9. Voltaire attacked the modern camp in a satirical poem ‘Le Bourbier’ (1714), Moland, X, 75-7. However, he summarised the debate impartially in an article in Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1770-2), Moland, XVII, 225-40. See David Williams, ‘Voltaire: Literary Critic’, SVEC, 48 (1966).

38. A similar argument, from a very different perspective, has been made about the French Enlightenment as a whole by Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford, 1988).

39. Voltaire started work in earnest in 1735. See Vaillot, Avec Mme du Châtelet, 42. However, he referred to the projected work as early as 1732: Voltaire to Jean Baptiste Nicholas Formont (c. 12 September 1732), Best. D526. He also outlined his plans in a letter to Dubos (30 October, 1738), Best. D1642.

40. For details of the 1739 portion of Le Siècle de Louis XIV, see Bengesco, Bibliographie, I, 341. I have based my observations throughout upon the George-Conrad Walther edition (2 vols.; Dresden, 1753) (Bengesco, no. 1186). Significant revisions to the first edition (2 vols.; Berlin, 1751) are noted. For ease of access, all quotations are cited in the first instance from Oeuvres historiques and I have given a second reference to the Walther edition immediately after this in my text. On the printing of Le Siècle de Louis XIV, see Pomeau and Mervaud, De la Cour au Jardin, 51, 61, 69, 73.

41. On Voltaire's sources, see Gustave Lanson, Voltaire, trans. Robert Wagoner (London, New York and Sydney, 1966), 97-8; J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, 59-60; Larissa Albina, ‘Voltaire et ses sources historiques’, Le XVIIIè Siècle, 13 (1981), 349-59; M. S. Rivière, ‘Voltaire and the Fronde’, Nottingham French Studies, 26 (1987), 1-18; Rivière, ‘Voltaire's use of Larrey and Limiers in Le Siècle de Louis XIV: History as a Science, an Art and a Philosophy’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 25 (1989), 34-53; Rivière, ‘Voltaire's use of Dangeau's Mémoires in Le Siegcle de Louis XIV: the paradox of the historian-raconteur’, SVEC, 256 (1989), 97-106; Pomeau and Mervaud, De la Cour au Jardin, 76-7. On Voltaire's oral sources, see Pomeau, D'Arouet à Voltaire, 236; Vaillot, Avec Mme du Châtelet, 72.

42. For a more systematic reading of Le Siècle as a classical tragedy, see M. S. Rivière, ‘Voltaire's concept of dramatic history in Le Siècle de Louis XIV’, SVEC, 284 (1991), 179-98.

43. N. R. Johnson, ‘Louis XIV and the Age of the Enlightenment: The Myth of the Sun King from 1715 to 1789’, SVEC, 172 (1978).

44. Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Revolution française (Paris, 1990), chapter 6.

45. Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1980); Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970).

46. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (revised edn, Cambridge, 1987).

47. Ranum, Artisans of Glory.

48. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, 376-88; J. Q. C. Mackrell, The Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-Century France (London, 1973).

49. Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘The abbé Dubos and the historical defence of monarchy in early eighteenth-century France’, SVEC, 267 (1989), 77-102.

50. The standard work is Elie Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le problème de la Constitution Française au XVIIIè Siècle (Paris, 1926). See also Iris Cox, ‘Montesquieu and the history of French Laws’, SVEC, 216 (1983).

51. C. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l'Esprit des lois (2nd edn, Paris, 1757), Books 20, 22. The concept of a depository body (‘corps dépositaire’) denotes a function within a state and need not necessarily be performed by parlements.

52. On 30 October, 1738, Voltaire wrote to Dubos to congratulate him on having clarified the question of French origins (Best. D1642).

53. Annales de l'Empire, depuis Charlemagne (2 vols.; Bâle, 1753), Moland, XIII, 220. See Pomeau and Mervaud, De la Cour au Jardin, 189-90, 207. For Voltaire's own annotations to J. B. Dubos, Histoire critique de l'établissement de la monarchie française dans les Gaules (3 vols.; Amsterdam, 1734), see Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, eds. L. Albina, T. Voronova, S. Manévitch et al. (Berlin, 1979-), II, 161-92.

54. Histoire du Parlement de Paris par M. l'abbé Bigore (2 vols.; Amsterdam, 1769), Moland, XV, 446. The text was altered and expanded successively in 1769 (Bengesco, Bibliographie, no. 1248), 1770 (Bengesco, no. 1251) and 1775 (Bengesco, no. 1253n.).

55. Corpus des notes marginales, I, 433-97.

56. Histoire du Parlement de Paris, Moland, XV, 448.

57. Peter Gay identifies two broad strains in eighteenth-century French political thought, the ‘thèse nobiliaire’ and the ‘thèse royale’, around which he groups, respectively, the Germanist and Romanist juristic theses. In so far as he de-emphasises the legalistic content of Voltaire's ‘thèse royale’, these broad outlines are helpful, although he has a tendency to place Voltaire in the Dubos camp, and to underestimate the flexibility of Voltaire's historical case for monarchy: Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (2nd edn, New Haven, 1988), 87-116. For a somewhat different critique of Gay's book, see Robert S. Tate, ‘Voltaire and the Question of Law and Order in the Eighteenth Century: Locke against Hobbes' in Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Literature Presented to Robert Niklaus, eds. J. Fox, M. Waddicor and D. Watts (Exeter, 1975).

58. Voltaire did not succeed in his aim of putting an end to juristic debate about the French constitution. Around this time, his fellow historian, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably set about constructing a legal-historical case for democracy in France. See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), chapter 4.

59. Voltaire's Politics, 101-2.

60. Pomeau ed., Politique de Voltaire (Paris, 1963), 36.

61. Pomeau finds Voltaire's preference both doctrinal and aesthetic (Politique de Voltaire, 41).

62. ‘On a dit dans l'Essai sur les mœurs, qu'il n'y a point en rigeur de loi positive fondamentale; les hommes ne peuvent faire que les lois de convention.’ (‘Remarques pour servir de supplément à l'Essai sur les mœurs’ (1763) in Essai, II, 936.)

63. Voltaire, ‘Poëme de Fontenoy’, Moland, VIII, 371-95.

64. Voltaire, ‘Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois’ (1777), Moland, XXX, 430. See also Pensées sur le gouvernement (1752), Moland, XXIII, 530 (‘Il n‘y a point d'Etat despotique par sa nature’).

65. There is a generous biographical note on Montesquieu in Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1187-8. Voltaire came to Montesquieu's defence during a pamphlet war over De l'Esprit des lois (Remerciement sincère à un homme charitable (1750), Moland, XXIII, 457-61). See also Robert Shackleton, ‘Allies and Enemies: Voltaire and Montesquieu’ in Essays on Montesquieu and the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1988).

66. Hugh Trevor-Roper identifies a split in the respective influences of Voltaire and Montesquieu, the former politically radical in his legacy, the latter conservative (‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment’, SVEC, 27 (1963), 1667-87).

67. For examples of this, see Pensées sur le gouvernement, Moland, XXIII, 531; Idées républicaines (1762), Moland, XXIV, 427; Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois, Moland, XXX, 426-7.

68. See also Commentaire, Moland, XXX, 417; Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu (Oxford, 1987), 114-18.

69. La Défense de mon oncle (1767), ed. José-Michel Moureaux, Works, LXIV (1984), 229.

70. In the Collection complète des Oeuvres de M. de Voltaire (17 vols.; Geneva, 1756) it makes up chapters 165-215 of the Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations.

71. Précis du Siècle de Louis XV (2 vols.; Geneva, 1769). This evolved out of the chapter ‘Tableau de l'Europe depuis la paix d'Utrecht jusqu'en 1750’ which featured in all editions of Le Siècle de Louis XIV. It also incorporates adapted portions of the Histoire de la guerre de mil sept cent quarante et un (1755), ed. J. Maurens (Paris, 1971). The Précis first appeared as an appendix to the 1768 edition of Le Siècle de Louis XIV (4 vols.; Geneva, 1768). The Précis was the indirect result of Voltaire having been made Historiographe de France in 1745, and having undertaken to write about Louis XV's campaigns. See Vaillot, Avec Mme du Châtelet, 209.

72. Précis, chapter 24. See Laurence Bongie, ‘Voltaire's English High Treason and a Manifesto for Bonnie Prince Charles’, SVEC, 171 (1979), 7-29; F. McClynn, ‘Voltaire and the Jacobite Rising of 1745’, SVEC, 185 (1980), 7-20.

73. On discontinuities between artistic and political progress, Bernard de Fontenelle, Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1955), 161-76.

74. Voltaire greatly admired Montaigne. See his letter to Louis Elisabeth de La Vergne, comte de Tressan (21 August, 1746), Best. D3453.

75. For a detailed bibliography of the Essai, see Pomeau ed, Essai, pp. lxvii-lxxiii. The Pomeau edition is based upon the ‘Kehl’ posthumous 1785 edition which incorporates Voltaire's final revisions. I have cited in my text the Pomeau edition for ease of access, followed by a second reference to the 1756 text of the Essai to be found in the Cramer Collection complète des oeuvres de M. de Voltaire (17 vols.; Geneva, 1756). The Essai makes up volumes XI to XIV of this edition. See also De la Cour au Jardin, 196-9; 298-300.

76. This, in a sophisticated way, is the thrust of much of the interpretation in J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire, Historian (revised edn, Oxford, 1970).

77. For intimate evidence of Voltaire's hostility to Rousseau, see George R. Havens, Voltaire's Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (New York, 1966).

78. Voltaire to Rousseau (30 August 1755), Best. D6451.

79. The 1756 text of the Essai is a more straightforwardly expanded version of the 1754 texts (Pomeau, Essai, pp.lxviii-lxxi), with additional information on feudal government, artistic and legal developments in the Middle Ages, and on the East (including Genghis Khan).

80. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l'histoire universelle à Monseigneur le Dauphin: pour expliquer la suite de la Religion et les changemens des Empires (Paris, 1681), 437. The work gives an overview of the rise and fall of empires before and after Christ up until the reign of Charlemagne.

81. For a less pessimistic account of ‘enchaînement, however, see Voltaire's article ‘Chaîne des événements’, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764 and after), eds. R. Naves and Julien Benda, (Paris, 1954).

82. La Philosophie de l'histoire (1765), Works, LIX. This work was added, after some alterations, as a preface to the Essai in the Cramer edition of 1769 as volume VIII of the Collection complète des Oeuvres de M. de Voltaire (45 vols.; Geneva, 1768-96). On Voltaire's contribution to the development of anthropology, see Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971). Also, Grell, L'histoire entre érudition et philosophie, 100-5.

83. The whole discussion of early forms of religious belief owes something to Voltaire's early acquaintance, Bolingbroke; the sections on the Pentateuch echo the sceptical tone of the fourth letter of Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History (first published, 1752). The vexed question of Bolingbroke's influence on Voltaire is addressed by Rousseau, ‘L'Angleterre et Voltaire’, SVEC, 147 (1976), 820-23. Voltaire's response to Bolingbroke can also be gauged directly from his Défense de milord Bolingbroke (1752), Moland, XXIII, 547-54, and his Examen important de milord Bolingbroke (1766 and 1767), ed. Roland Mortier, Works, LXII (1987), 127-362, as well as from the numerous references in the Essai. In the Examen, Voltaire, writing as an imagined Bolingbroke, ventriloquises him as a scathing satirist against many tenets of Judaeo-Christianity—a clear indication that, by this time, the balance between former pupil and master had shifted in Voltaire's favour.

84. Works, LIX, 180.

85. Works, LIX, 274-5.

86. Works, LIX, 274.