Twenty-two chapters and almost four hundred pages in octavo: this is what it takes Sabatier de Castres to enumerate, in chronological order, the enemies with whom Voltaire clashed between the 1730s and 1768. Published in 1771, his brochure, which he presents ironically as the 'portrait' of Voltaire's 'mind', describes a literary career punctuated by a series of quarrels: as the title of the 1802 edition indicates, Voltaire's was a 'polemical life'. Seen in this admittedly not entirely impartial way, the whole of Voltaire's life and works could be said to be polemical. It would be impossible to conjure these up in their entirety in just a few pages, so I shall instead focus on the characteristic features of some of those texts which have often been called 'faceties' or, more commonly, 'pamphlets'.

The pamphlet is a double-edged sword, for Voltaire presumably ran the risk, by responding to a particular enemy, of giving that person a notoriety which his own works alone would never have earned him: La Beaumelle, the Marquis de Pompignan, Freron and many others are only known today, surely, because of their noisy quarrels with Voltaire. So why does Voltaire resort to writing pamphlets? The strategy is in fact only paradoxical if we take for granted the longevity of his pamphlets. We need, therefore, to consider their reception from the very time of their composition. Their longevity is beyond doubt, particularly in the light of recent criticism which, by interrogating the notion of literarity, has contributed to a comprehensive re-evaluation of the literary hierarchy, an idea inherited from a view of literary history as a history of masterpieces, made up of 'great' and 'minor' texts.