Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T06:30:43.153Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Voltaire: History Unexemplary and en Philosophe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

M. A. Fitzsimons
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The victims of the wars of religion and persecution had their revenge in the growth of a temper indifferent to the claims of particular churches. There were others too who, adopting ancient materialisms, rationalism or the outlook of physical science, rejected theology and abandoned religion altogether. For both, the Enlightenment meant a polemic against the Christian churches, as well as Judaism, and the articulation of new beliefs. Since religions touched in different degrees all spheres of life, the battleground included philosophy, morality and history. Superstition and persecution were the themes of Enlightened church history. God's hand, if there was a God, might direct history in some ultimate way, but not by direct intervention. As there was no “sacred history,” the meaning of history or, at any rate, a way of looking at history, had to be sought anew. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, this task attracted a remarkable and numerous response, to which the Romantic period added the dense and challenging Idealist philosophies of history. The philosophes, the gurus of Enlightenment, presented history's meaning as not in the past but to come, as salvation from the irrational and the brutal, presented it with a clarity as misleading as it was persuasive.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 447 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Letter 3044 from the Besterman edition of Voltaire's letters in Besterman, Theodore, Voltaire (London, 1969), p. 43Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 35.

3 Voltaire did not have clean hands in this matter. In 1719 he had accorded the same treatment, duel refusal and the hire of thrashers, to an actor, Poisson. In his later career, Voltaire protested against the social prejudices experienced by stage people.

4 Lettres Philosophiques, edited by Taylor, F. A. for “Blackwell's French Texts” (Oxford, 1976), Lettre XVIII, pp. 68–72Google Scholar. On p. 93 Voltaire suggested that the Académic Françhise edit the great works of the age of Louis XIV. This meant correcting the faults of language which Voltaire found numerous in Corneille and Molière and abundant in La Fontaine.

5 Besterman, , Voltaire, p. 149Google Scholar; Voltaire, , “The World as It Is,” in Candide, Zadig and Other Stories (New York, 1961), pp. 198–199Google Scholar.

6 Voltaire, , Oeuvres Historiques, ed. Pomeau, (Paris, 1957), p. 272Google Scholar.

7 This terse paraphrase is by Hatton, Ragnhild M. in Charles XII of Sweden (London, 1968), p. xivGoogle Scholar.

8 Voltaire, , Oeuvres Historiques, pp. 303–304Google Scholar.

9 Condorcet, , Oeuvres, eds. O'Connor, and Arago, (Paris, 1847–1849), IV: 47Google Scholar. His own style and vision are the grounds on which Voltaire criticized Ramsay's, Andre MichelHistoire du Vicomte de Turenne (1735)Google Scholar. The author, Voltaire agreed, copied material from de Retz, a vivacious scoundrel, and phrases of Fénelon “but he has not made his hero interesting. He calls him great but he has not rendered him such; he praises him in rhetoric.”

10 Voltaire, , Oeuvres Historiques, p. 271Google Scholar.

11 de Mably, Abbé: Two Dialogues Concerning the Manner of Writing History (London, 1783), p. 31Google Scholar.

12 “Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand” and “Preface” (1759) in Oeuvres Historiques, pp. 339, 1687. Peter is a hero of civilization and Enlightenment, even though the work is finally not presented as a study of Peter but of the Russian Empire under him.

13 Ibid., p. 599; Mohrenschildt, Dmitri, Russia in the Intellectual Life of Eighteenth Century France (New York, 1936)Google Scholar.

14 Letter, March 25, 1760, quoted in Lortholary, Albert, Le Mirage Russe en France au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1951), p. 65Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., p. 134, characterizes Voltaire's writings on Peter and for Catherine as an assurance, hallowed by the mantle of the philosophes, that the empress “could with a secure conscience draw the sword for ideas.” Violence, thereby, has been restored as an instrument of civilization. This point is painfully evident in the emetic letters of Voltaire to Catherine in Lentin, A., Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence (Cambridge, 1974), esp. p. 44Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 31.

17 Daniel, P., Histoire de France (Paris, 1722 ed.), p. lvGoogle Scholar.

18 Voltaire, , Oeuvres Historiques, p. 1255Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 607.

20 Letter 876, 24 August 1735, in Correspondence, ed. Besterman, (Geneva, 1964), IV: 114Google Scholar. There is a good account of the history in Brumfitt, J. H., Voltaire: Historian (London, 1958), esp. pp. 48–61Google Scholar. The standard edition of Le Siècle de Louis XIV is by Bourgeois, Émile (Paris, 1906)Google Scholar. I have had to use Pomeau's edition in Oeuvres Historiques.

21 Voltaire, , Oeuvres Historiques, p. 1274Google Scholar. Voltaire professed that his Enlightened age required authors to set order into our ideas and ridiculed “pedants” who without thinking themselves and lacking taste, recorded in lengthy detail “What was thought.” “Lettre a M. de Cideville” and “Le Temple du Goût” (1732) in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, Louis (Paris, 1877–1885), VIII: 552–557Google Scholar.

22 These two paragraphs follow closely two of Voltaire's letters (1735) one, already cited, to Olivet and another to his friend Nicolas Claude Thieriot. Besterman, , Correspondence, IV, nos. 876 and 864, pp. 114 and 94Google Scholar.

23 Thuret, M. F., Oeuvres de Locke et Leibnitz (Paris, 1839), p. 480Google Scholar.

24 Besterman, , Correspondence, IV: p. 89Google Scholar.

25 Besterman, , Correspondence, no. 860, 06, 1735, IV: 89Google Scholar; no. 864, c. 15 July 1735, p. 94; no. 876, 24 August 1735, p. 114.

26 Ibid., p. 369.

27 Voltaire, , Essai sur les moeurs et I'esprit des nations, ed. Pomeau, R. (Paris, 1963), II: 306Google Scholar. All subsequent references will be in the text and to this edition.

28 Besterman, , Correspondence, no. 15931, LXXVIII: 26–27Google Scholar.

29 Condorcet, , Oeuvres IV: 149Google Scholar.

30 Ibid., IV: 96.

31 Besterman, , Voltaire, p. 583Google Scholar.

32 Voltaire, , Oeuvres Complètes, X: 276Google Scholar.

33 D'Alembert, , “Reflexions sur l'histoire et sur les différents manières de l'écrire,” in Oeuvres Philosophiques, Historiques et Litteraires (Paris 1805), IV: 188Google Scholar.

34 Besterman, , Voltaire's Correspondence, letter of 1778 to Frederick the Great, no. 19818, XCVIII: 9Google Scholar.

35 D'Alembert, , Oeuvres Philosophiques, IV: 193Google Scholar.

36 Condorcet, , Oeuvres, IV: 1Google Scholar.