Introduction: Voltaire and the problem of historical plausibility

Despite the variety of contemporary interests in the work of neoclassical and Enlightenment historians, it is widely accepted today that one of their key questions—perhaps even their central intellectual concern—had to do with the very possibility of historical knowledge. One could formulate the problem in the following manner: how can historians—qua historians—account for what seems to be, by definition, antihistorical? More specifically, how can they speak on those types of event and fact that, while part of their cultural landscape, seemingly belonged to the realm of the fabulous, the mythical, or the implausible?

No eighteenth-century historian was more attached to this problem—or has been more associated with it—than Voltaire. Indeed, the questions above could be seen as the animating force behind the opening lines of his famous article “History,” written for Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (“HISTORY is the narrative of facts given as true; as opposed to the fable, which is the narrative of facts given as false”).Footnote ¹ And yet the problem of separating “history” from “fable”—and of mapping that separation onto a distinction between “truth” and “falsehood”—certainly did not start with the Enlightenment, much less with Voltaire. As many have shown, it emanated from the work of seventeenth-century antiquarians, who sought to establish a new epistemic basis for historical analysis founded on a radical distinction between “original” and “derivative” sources, on a reinvigorated interest in material remains, and on a redefinition of historiography itself as the collection (rather than the interpretation) of facts.

As Arnaldo Momigliano (and, afterwards, Blandine Barret-Kriegel and Anthony Grafton) have demonstrated, the practices of seventeenth-century antiquarians were broadly discontinuous with the kind of grand historical narratives practiced from antiquity throughout the Renaissance, the very same practices that neoclassical writers of the eighteenth century would later seek to preserve and emulate.Footnote ² Still, this reinvigorated preoccupation with the difference between histories and fables would become a crucial element of how Enlightenment historians presented and even advertised their craft.Footnote ³ In fact, it would act as the lynchpin for their own refurbishing of historiography such as it was practiced from Thucydides onwards.

To neoclassical authors like Voltaire, the ancients had already understood a few crucial things about the writing of histories. For one, they had already underscored the importance of dignity and laid out the rhetorical principles later used to separate historiography from the comparatively less prestigious genres of the comedy, the memoir, and the novel. In short, they understood (if somewhat instinctively) that proper histories, like epics and tragedies, stuck to “grand” matters of public interest and stately affairs, and conversely rejected anything related to the purely private, mundane, or trivial. Likewise, the ancients—with the exception of Herodotus—had also grasped the importance of a well-constructed and digression-free narrative. They had already laid out the poetic foundations that would separate great historical works from the drier, less engaging, and less intuitive genres of the annal, the compilation of anecdotes, and the historical dictionary.Footnote ⁴ What ancient historiography lacked (and what neoclassical writers sought to bring into the genre) was a more robust commitment to the truth and a more sober detachment from the marvelous, the “romanesque” and the fantastic.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, one could potentially articulate the “mission statement” of neoclassical historiography in the following terms: to reproduce and emulate the gravitas of ancient political histories, while banishing from the historical text anything that did not stand up to careful factual scrutiny, that did not meet steep standards of plausibility, or that seemed overall too undignified or banal to be intellectually useful.Footnote ⁶

Twentieth-century critics of neoclassicism have, by and large, come together in defining this particular attitude towards the past as flawed. Some exceptions notwithstanding, they generally agree that it would only be at the tail end of the Enlightenment (with Herder) and later still, with the rise of Romantic historiography, that proper modes of accounting—historically—for the fabulous, trivial, and seemingly unlikely moments of the past would be developed. Such is the narrative we find in classical works by Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and R. G. Collingwood, as well as more recent works by Suzanne Gearhart and Hayden White.Footnote ⁷ While these critics do not fully agree on the motivations behind the Enlightenment's desire to separate history from both the fabulous and the ordinary, they do agree that this attempted separation led neoclassical writers to at least two grave mistakes.

The first was a cultivated disdain towards entire ages of the past (and entire cultures) deemed too steeped in irrationality and superstition to allow a distinction between the historically “plausible” (and the historically “useful”) and its opposite(s).Footnote ⁸ The second, and more serious, was nothing more than an extension of the first, namely a growing distrust towards history's own ability to produce any reliable or useful knowledge of the world. To borrow White's language, the historical thought of the Enlightenment was condemned to wallow in a kind of bitter and self-destructive irony, as its concerns with truth, “realism,” and plausibility led it to banish most of “the past” from history's own sphere of concern, towards the domain of poetry, religious belief (if not fanaticism), or general folly.Footnote ⁹

This problem was compounded by the complicated relationship between two of the pillars that allegedly sustained neoclassical and Enlightenment history, namely “truth” and “plausibility.” Even as modern scholars started moving towards a more nuanced understanding of neoclassicism, they still held eighteenth-century historians responsible for transforming plausibility (previously a “pragmatic middle ground between complete certainty and extreme Pyrrhonism”) into something of an obsession.Footnote ¹⁰ Here, Voltaire does indeed emerge as the main culprit. In the 1980s, Suzanne Gearhart argued that, to the philosophe, “historical plausibility” was elevated to such an extreme degree of importance that the concept took over the very idea of truth itself: “The ‘vraisemblable’ is the ultimate standard of historiography, so much so that it takes precedence over the ‘vrai,’ the factually true. It is conceivable for Voltaire that an event that is not ‘vraisemblable’ could have taken place, but it would not be a proper object for history simply because it was true.”Footnote ¹¹ In her article on the philosophe's historical work, Síofra Pierse essentially repeats this point and identifies a rejection of the implausible as the first rule of thumb of Voltaire's entire methodology and critical thinking: “First, history must reject fiction and fantasy from the text and deal only with serious fact. Modern history must be accurate and vraisemblable.”Footnote ¹²

In a sense, Voltaire seems to willingly open himself to this type of analysis. As many have shown, his commentary on historical writing (if not his own historiographical output) is permeated by what appears to be an intense and even paranoid dismissal of anything that resembles the “improbable.” In the same “History” article, Voltaire pushes back against another Encyclopédie essay, namely the anonymous “Certitude” entry, precisely on the relationship between knowledge, truth, and vraisemblance. The essay on “Certitude” posited that two historical events of radically distinct degrees of plausibility—a dead man coming back to life and France's victory at the Battle of Fontenoy—should be seen as equally “certain” provided they had been related by witnesses of the same number and reliability. The claim prickled Voltaire, likely due to the rather extreme difference between the two examples used. As a result, he was forced to remind his colleague (whoever they were) of the difference between “probable” and “improbable” facts, and to underline the importance of common sense in the composition of proper historiography.Footnote ¹³

Much later in his career, in his famous essay on historical skepticism (“Le pyrrhonisme de l'histoire” (The Pyrrhonism of History), 1768), Voltaire would develop this position further and warn his readers, from the outset, of the distinction between the “main facts” and the (often sketchier) “details” that made up most historical narratives. To him, histories could be true in their broadest strokes but filled with falsehoods in their minutiae.Footnote ¹⁴ In fact, this is what seemingly characterized the entire edifice of ancient and religious historiography in the philosophe's eyes: an outer skeleton of superficial truths concealing nothing but the spirit of myth and superstition. From Herodotus to Bossuet, history found its recurring downfall in the constant resorting to embellishments that turned general (but believable) facts into detailed (but hopelessly implausible) literary narratives.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, if in “History” Voltaire underscored the dangers of a kind of metaphysical tomfoolery (not acknowledging the obvious difference between the probable and the improbable), here he took a more aesthetic approach. Following in the footsteps of his skeptic influence (Pierre Bayle), the philosophe saw the “implausible” and the “fabulous” as originating in man's often childlike desire for wonders, which the ancients, to him, seemingly never managed to master or overcome.Footnote ¹⁶

As some have argued already, the sentiments laid out in “Le pyrrhonisme de l'histoire” can appear deceptively banal, leading us into a simplistic view of Voltaire's historical imagination.Footnote ¹⁷ And indeed, in this article I will take us a step further and show how they are challenged by Voltaire's own historiographical work. To the philosophe's critics, however, these were damning opinions that conveyed, if not a certain impatience towards what Vico called a “poetic” understanding of the world, then a type of ideological bias masquerading as “skeptic impartiality.” Perhaps the biggest example of this critique is to be found in John Pocock's multivolume study of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Barbarism and Religion, 1999–2015), a work that features an extensive commentary on Voltaire (particularly in volume 2, from the year 2000) as one of Gibbon's most important models.

Pocock's treatment of Voltaire is long, but his thesis is relatively straightforward. Simply put, the philosophe was a somewhat problematic influence over Gibbon, something of an “exasperating predecessor.” On the one hand, Voltaire was the first to introduce the possibility of a “history of manners [moeurs]” and thus to introduce “manners” themselves as a historical-philosophical concept that could stand in for the “totality of ways of living.” In that sense, Voltaire could plausibly be seen as the precursor of what we today call “cultural” or “social” history.Footnote ¹⁸ Likewise, the philosophe was the first to try and execute this expanded historical framework poetically, to actually produce histories that escaped the traditional models of kingly, military, or ecclesiastical narratives laid out by the historians of antiquity and the Renaissance.

And yet Voltaire was also a questionable historian who failed to properly divulge his sources and, more incriminatingly still, displayed a general inability to accept as “historical” any fact that conflicted with his personal ideology or agenda.Footnote ¹⁹ It is in this particular point that Gibbon (and, indeed, Pocock himself) folds Voltaire's work back into the critical discourse we have been tracing here.Footnote ²⁰ To Gibbon and Pocock, Voltaire's skeptical attitude (his alleged desire for common sense and for plausibility) was nothing more than a transparent preference for the facts and narratives that fit his own vision of a secular and cosmopolitan world besieged by Christian dogmatism and propaganda.Footnote ²¹ In failing to exercise any kind of restraint or self-awareness towards his own biases, Voltaire often committed the opposite of (and, to Gibbon, something far worse than) an embellishment: he quickly dismissed as “implausible” events that, upon careful examination, were well corroborated by both witnesses and textual sources.Footnote ²² His pyrrhonism (unlike Gibbon's) was not tempered by a contrasting spirit of erudition which would have allowed him to set aside his own sense of the historically “probable” (or “desirable”) and look at his evidence thoroughly.Footnote ²³

Before Pocock, others had already made similar cases about Voltaire, the biggest example being Blandine Barret-Kriegel. In her own work on the arts of erudites (bombastically titled La défaite de l’érudition, 1988) Barret-Kriegel presents the generalizing histories of the eighteenth century as the spear that shattered the source-based epistemology of antiquarianism, with Voltaire himself as the very tip. To her, Voltaire's desire to recast historiography as a narrative both elegant and broad (to refashion the history of princes as the “history of peoples,” and the history of states as the “history of nations”) was tantamount to altering the very nature of “historical truth.”Footnote ²⁴ Much like in Pocock's work, the connection between Voltaire's widened range of interests and his skepticism is left somewhat implicit by Barret-Kriegel, but it is very much essential to her understanding of the philosophe's historical project. In the sweeping sketches of human civilizations that made up Voltaire's most famous historical works (especially his long Essai sur les moeurs (Essay on Manners), 1756), “truth” could only ever be a general and vague phenomenon, a byproduct of vraisemblance, which was itself shaped by nothing more than Voltaire's own expectations as a writer, as a master of public opinion, and as a “worldly man.”Footnote ²⁵ This mode of historical truth, to Barret-Kriegel, disregarded not only the specificity and factual precision coveted by antiquarian methods, but also the broader ethical attitude underlining them (that is, the assumption that the historian's point of view, his or her sense of the truth, must always and primarily be framed by the sources).Footnote ²⁶ In that sense, Voltaire's skepticism was not just a critique of fables, fantasies, and religious propaganda. It was, as Gearhart had already argued, a radical adoption of “la vraisemblance” as “the only criterion of reality.”Footnote ²⁷

Finally, the recognition of Voltaire's militant skepticism subsists even in more recent studies that have sought to spotlight the philosophical breadth of his historical vision. Marc Crépon, in an article from the year 2000, makes the case that separating fables from history was necessary for Voltaire to properly trace the progress of human civilizations in time. In trying to frame the philosophe as a precursor to Kant (and to the Kantian interest in teleology and “historical expectations”), Crépon hyperbolizes Voltaire's desire for a new historiography entirely removed from the outlandish or dissimulative narratives of ancient and religious authors.Footnote ²⁸ To properly explain how human cultures developed over time (and how they ought to keep developing), Voltaire, Crépon suggests, believed that history had to reinvent itself as a (self-)critical discipline capable of denouncing the “fable” as a force of ignorance and superstition in the world.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, History could only act as an engine of enlightenment if it was, itself, “enlightened”; that is, if it sought to restore truth by excluding that which seemingly went against the order of nature (namely the supernatural and the miraculous) and the order of “human affairs” (choses humaines) (namely the implausible, or anything that would contradict a certain constancy of human nature and manners).Footnote ³⁰

In his own work on Voltaire's philosophy of history, Bertrand Binoche moves in the opposite direction, only to arrive at a similar place. Unlike Crépon, Binoche effectively rejects any notion of Voltaire as a teleologist, let alone a “historian of progress.”Footnote ³¹ In his mind, the philosophical thrust of Voltaire's historical vision lay precisely in its ability to delegitimize grand narratives of providential redemption (such as Bossuet's) or, alternatively, generalizing systems of anthropology (such as Rousseau's). In that sense, Voltaire's philosophy of history was intentionally “negative” and destructive: it mobilized facts as a way to throw doubts on any attempt to fully understand the world and human nature.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Binoche finds, at the root of this project, the same toxic pyrrhonism we have been tracing here. Not unlike Hayden White before him, he argues that Voltaire's obsession with using facts as critical tools came at the expense of his ability to see history itself as a type of theoretical discourse, one that relied on speculation to transform disconnected events into a rational, meaningful, and believable plot.Footnote ³² In other words, the more history started to extrapolate from individual facts and to move towards generalizations, the more it started to resemble the abstract systems and chimeric narratives it sought to combat in the first place. Thus Binoche sees Voltaire's philosophy of history as paradoxical and poisoned by its own skepticism: the arguments it deploys to discredit its enemies can be used against the historian's own desire to create his or her own explanations for worldly phenomena. Taking this particular understanding of Voltaire's system to its logical extreme, the very notion of a “historical explanation” would become essentially contiguous with the notion of “fable.”Footnote ³³ Before Binoche, Roland Barthes had already reached a similar conclusion: “Voltaire wrote historical works expressly to say that he did not believe in history.”Footnote ³⁴

In all fairness, the analyses discussed in the last few paragraphs do not have the same kind of critical and even discrediting intentions that one sees in the analyses published from the 1930s to the 1980s. If anything, they all underscore different reasons why Voltaire's historical project was, despite everything, ambitious, compelling, and innovative. Nevertheless, they are based on a shared notion that Voltaire's historical imagination (if not his broader philosophical concerns) was founded on an anxious fixation with doubt, and on a self-appointed mission to safeguard the historical world from the encroaching threat of the implausible, the fabulous, and the unreasonable.

This article presents a contrasting view on the matter. Here, I will argue that, while understanding the difference between “history” and “fable” (in both epistemic and poetic terms) was very much a theoretical concern of Voltaire's, he was in practice deeply cognizant of the contiguity between the “historical” and the “non-historical.” Indeed, this contiguity was to him both an inescapable problem and, occasionally, a source of wonder for the historian. To make my point, I will offer a study of a text that has been somewhat neglected as a piece of Enlightenment historiography: Voltaire's first historical essay, Histoire de Charles XII (History of Charles XII), first published in 1731. Aside from being generally under-studied, Voltaire's Charles XII largely destabilizes the neat image of the philosophe as a blunt and unimaginative pyrrhonist hiding behind his sharp and witty pen. It is, in other words, a book that compels Voltaire to negotiate between his need for a “believable past” and his awareness of history as the space of the awe-inspiring, the extraordinary, and even the grotesque.

What follows will be a focused analysis of the work centered around a particularly dramatic moment: the shocking death of the titular hero at the very end of the narrative. Through a close reading of this episode, I will make the case that, while Voltaire's first kingly biography has been both praised and maligned as a type of “historical satire” (that is, as a subversion of history's “seriousness” founded on a figure both ridiculous and unbelievable), the book should instead be seen as a study and a celebration of a romanesque and “mythical” past. Looking at Voltaire's first history in such a way allows us to get a different (and, in my mind, more holistic) idea of his historical imagination. Indeed, it shows that Voltaire's interests in historiography emerged not from a philosophical desire to separate plausible truths from the quagmire of useless lies and dangerous propaganda, but from a poetic (and even poignant) effort to challenge one's desire for historical plausibility itself.

“The play is ended”: the strange death of Charles XII

In theory, readers should not have been too surprised to encounter the violent death of Charles XII at the end of Voltaire's historical narrative. The philosophe himself prepared his audience for what was to come at different points of the work. In fact, as early as the second edition of the book (published just one year after the first) readers would have been informed, in the very Preface, that Voltaire's plot would not be leading them to a happy or redemptive ending. More specifically, they would have been greeted with a rather ominous warning from the author:

The message here seems clear to the point of heavy-handedness. In fact, it seems borrowed wholesale from “mirrors of princes” made popular by Renaissance humanists: what we are reading is not exactly a heroic epic or an inspiring account of military and political success, but a cautionary tale heavily permeated by irony. While Charles XII does achieve the status of an exemplary figure by the strength of his virtues and military skill, these merits ultimately mean nothing in the face of his undue ambition and, more importantly still, of History's own chaotic and uncaring nature. Voltaire was, of course, not the first to look to the past to bring this point across (Machiavelli had done so before him, and Polybius before Machiavelli), but the message is still carried out with particular bite in the passage above: all the strength in the world will not protect you from the vicissitudes of Fortune, and no man was ever mighty enough to safely tempt fate. Thus, while Histoire de Charles XII sets out to meet the pedagogical demands of neoclassical and late humanist historiography, death, failure, and misfortune seem to be always lurking around the corner.

And yet, the demise of the hero still manages to emerge in the work as something of a sudden and even shocking event. Part of the reason has to do with its anticlimactic nature. True enough, by the time they reach the final book of the narrative, readers are likely to be aware of Voltaire's seemingly ironic take on Charles and on military histories as a whole. While the philosophe's account of the Swedish king begins in the trappings of a quasi-epic tale of underdog heroics (a prodigious young warrior leading a small kingdom against the imperialistic ambitions of the mighty Russian Empire of Peter the Great), this plot structure does not hold. By the halfway point—after Charles's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Poltava, meticulously narrated by Voltaire in Book IV—the king's time as a revived Alexander the Great (a title Charles gave himself, Voltaire makes it a point to mention) seems to be up. It has been cut short by a near-death experience, a disgraceful exile in the Ottoman Empire, and an all-but-lost kingdom. But even this rather extraordinary “plot twist” fails to prepare the reader for the quickness with which the hero meets his end in Book VIII. After a long narrative filled with histrionic, hyperbolic, and often absurd moments of heroism (as I will very soon demonstrate), Charles XII dies unceremoniously: shot in the head by an anonymous sniper while trying to besiege a minor fortress in Norway, itself a somewhat desperate attempt to reignite his failed campaign against Peter. And indeed, in bringing this moment to his reader, Voltaire seems to relish in its absurdity and abruptness:

As previously mentioned, this article will spend some time breaking down some of the poetic elements of this moment. Before that, however, it is important to situate it, and the book as a whole, in a broader context.

The complicated readership of Histoire de Charles XII

Despite not receiving much attention from readers old and new, the death of Charles XII in Voltaire's narrative seems designed to strengthen the book's reputation as a work of satire that, if not deliberately slanderous, was at least guilty of using the past for the purposes of entertaining, rather than educating, an audience.Footnote ³⁷ This reputation is as old as Histoire de Charles XII itself. In fact, it first emerged from the king's own court: Joran Nordberg (Charles's chaplain and official historian) would offer the ironic compliment of praising the “vivacity of style” with which Voltaire maligned his hero, describing the philosophe like Voltaire himself described historian Antoine Varillas: as a skilled liar.Footnote ³⁸ Others soon followed suit with similar attacks. Diplomat Aubry de la Montraye, who also knew the king personally and was present for some of the events narrated in Histoire de Charles XII, offered a series of critical remarks on the work which outlined more than fifty instances of mistake and willful misinformation on the part of Voltaire. The remarks were, ultimately, a rather roundabout way to make a simple point, namely that Voltaire was no historian, but rather a sort of base novelist who sacrificed erudition, factual exactitude, and a sense of rhetorical sobriety (in other words, history itself) at the altar of invention and gawdy stylistic showmanship.Footnote ³⁹

A few years after its publication, the Abbé Desfontaines would double down on these sentiments by calling Histoire de Charles XII a “bad novel” (mauvais roman), the work of an “[i]gnorant buffoon, written in the banter-like style of a bourgeois gossip [une Cailette bourgeoise] that weaves together adventures.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This sentiment was echoed in the personal notebooks of an even bigger heavyweight of the time, Montesquieu.Footnote ⁴¹ Even Condorcet, arguably Voltaire's most enthusiastic supporter in the late Enlightenment, in attempting to redeem Histoire de Charles XII, could not help but emphasize the philosophe's “novelistic” ability to elicit his reader's interest over his substance and legitimacy as a historian.Footnote ⁴² By the turn of the nineteenth century, Histoire de Charles XII was seemingly caught in a widespread characterization of Voltaire as a well-intentioned amateur at best, or a perverse dilletante at worst. This was particularly the case in Germany, where proponents of the emerging Göttingen school elected the philosophe the antithesis of a trustworthy historian: too concerned with his own readership to be detail-oriented and faithful to the facts.Footnote ⁴³

The critical edge of these readings would, as we now know, eventually lose its sharpness. Indeed, the decades and centuries that followed Enlightenment poetics would see the generic tension that structured early critiques of Histoire de Charles XII—that is, the tension between histories and novels, between writing meant to “educate” and writing meant to “entertain”—begin to crumble, especially under the weight of the structuralist, post-structuralist, and narratological interventions of Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and, here too, Hayden White. We now accept, without making much of a fuss, that history can often (and unproblematically) assume the form of a “verbal invention” that relies on narratological techniques not unlike those employed by novelists and narrative poets.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even more importantly, we know that neoclassical and Enlightenment writers already had that figured out: François Fénelon (to speak of an important influence in Voltaire's literary education), as early as 1712, already spoke of the importance of narrative cohesion and “poetic unity” in histories. Going even further, he already emphasized the fact that, in order for histories to be both understood and enjoyed, they should resemble not so much a compendium of random facts (relevant or irrelevant) displayed in chronological order – as Aristotle had suggested – but rather an epic poem, itself centered around a specific action or problem explained in terms of causes and consequences.Footnote ⁴⁵

Moreover, the very notion of a “historical satire” would cease to have any inherently negative connotations. At least since Nietzsche's essay “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben” (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life) (1874), we have a conceptual framework with which to take seriously writings meant to rob the past of its grandiosity and overbearing exemplarity. To many contemporary readers of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche's idea of “critical history” is useful precisely as a means to legitimize works of historical irony as efforts in a “philosophical emancipation” from any tradition that had become a burden to modern freedom, spontaneity, and innovation. Simply put, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, it was no longer taboo—or even that original—to laugh at the past's remoteness, primitiveness, and outdatedness. White himself, who otherwise believed that Voltaire's distinction between “history” and “fable” was at best naive, did concede that this had very little to do with the potentially satirical aspects of his work.Footnote ⁴⁶

If, however, history's proximity to satires, epics, and novels lost some of its problematic or controversial aura from the nineteenth century onward, Histoire de Charles XII was still recognized as nothing other than a satirical history of a political figure, and an overtly “literary” one at that. The book's reputation had ceased to be negative, surely enough, but it did not otherwise change. Indeed, skipping ahead a few decades, we find this reputation reinstated in one of the most thorough and still, to this day, authoritative readings of the text: Lionel Gossman's essay “Voltaire's Charles XII: History into Art” (1963).

Unlike his predecessors (and even some of his successors), Gossman is not overtly invested in Voltaire's triumphs or failures as a historian in a strict sense. His argument is primarily formalistic: the strength and the narrative appeal of Voltaire's first history lie in its particular usage of a theatrical structure to distill a complex historical period into an antithesis between two dramatis personae, not unlike a morality play.Footnote ⁴⁷ On one corner, we have Charles XII himself as the representative of decadent medieval militarism and chivalric excesses: a warrior king whose earnest devotion to his kingdom's independence is only matched by his hunger for glory in the battlefield. On the other corner, we see Charles's somber double: Peter the Great, who not only displays an incipient form of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, but whose studious disposition and subtle preference for intellectual over military activity allow him, paradoxically enough, to build an empire to rival those of antiquity. Thus, if Charles thought of himself as Alexander the Great reincarnated, Voltaire presents Peter the Great, much like he would Louis XIV, as something altogether new: a sign of the emerging future of “philosopher kings” whose hopes Frederick the Great, decades later, would come to carry. It is this structure, in Gossman's mind, that allows Voltaire to fundamentally present the events of his first history as part of a “picaresque mock-epic” in which the chivalric hero of ancient histories resists, obliviously, his own outmodedness, only to be met with a disgraceful death at the end. In short, if Histoire de Charles XII is to Gossman a play (and a masterfully written one at that), the spectacle is still satirical and, ultimately, cautionary.Footnote ⁴⁸ In White's own interpretation of Gossman's analysis, he brings this point out by calling Histoire de Charles XII a “near-tragedy, a tragedy which misfired because of the essential ‘folly’ of the aims that motivated the protagonist.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Given Gossman's reliance on the notions of theater, theatricality, and tragicomedy, it is quite puzzling that he did not pay any close attention to the king's death scene in his article, seemingly the moment where Voltaire's text fully embraced its role as a kind of comedic play: “Come, gentlemen, the play is ended, let us now go to supper.” Still, it is worth looking at the scene more closely here and unpacking some of the moments that can, indeed, facilitate a satirical reading of the work.

To begin with, one must consider that particular element of Voltairean prose that Italo Calvino would identify as the defining feature of works like Candide, namely the speed and the brio with which events take place.Footnote ⁵⁰ More specifically, it is important to note that Charles XII dies without much warning, with an abruptness that is itself quite comedic. As we can see, the passage quoted previously is marked by a sudden and ambiguous shift from the imperfect past (“the king was [standing] exposed”/“le roi était exposé”) to the pluperfect (“he had already died”/“il était déjà mort”), a transition that, in the broader sense of Voltaire's history, is almost anticlimactic: this mighty warrior whose exploits the reader digested through eight books of dense historical narrative dies without much pathos (or much of a fight). There are no last words, no dramatic suffering, and no struggle for survival. If we are to be entirely accurate, the actual “event” of death is omitted by Voltaire there. What we have is closer to a forensic reconstruction of said event from the remains of the royal body, like an autopsy. In short, Charles goes from king to corpse in a flash, too fast for us to actually see it happening.

The corpse itself, in fact, counts as a second satirical element in the scene. Brief as it is, the vivid depiction of the king's destroyed visage—his head grotesquely pierced and turned around, left eye caved into the skull, right eye dangling outside it—can be ranked as one of the most morbid (and crudest) in Voltaire's early corpus. For most readers of his work, this image produces a subversion of expectations typical of satirical plots: at the end of his military history, Voltaire gives us a warrior's death that, in open defiance to classical aesthetic values, refuses to also be a “beautiful death.” As if to underline the strangeness of the moment, the author also has us witness it through the eyes of a man “singulier et indifférent,” a man who stumbled into the drama only a few sentences prior to the hero's death. Bizarrely enough, this stranger (both to the reader and to the king) is given the privilege of announcing Charles's passing, which he delivers in comedically detached fashion, as a stranger. One can see a good degree of self-insertion here: not only is Mégret French (Voltaire makes it a point to mention), but also he, like the philosophe, cultivates a healthy sense of clarity and disinterest over “le spectacle” in front of him, announcing the “end of the play” in the same breath as he announces his dinner plans. To put it simply, the engineer is, at the very least, a dubiously convenient narrative device: the right witness, with the right amount of wit, placed at the ideal moment to craft a punchline that, from its very presence in a historical work, infuses it with a slightly irreverent attitude.

It seems, then, that we are firmly placed in the realm of the satirical, with this moment serving as an explicit confirmation of Voltaire's warnings on the dangers of “la folie de conquêtes.” More than that, it appears that this ending also reinforces Gossman's perception of the work as a “mock-epic” in which the traditional hero of ancient military narratives is broken, humiliated, and ridiculed. And yet, the question whether or not the work is a “satire” or a “mock-epic” bypasses a much more prominent discussion. In fact, it obfuscates a more basic—and thus more central—poetic and intellectual challenge buried deep within Histoire de Charles XII, namely the challenge of how to write about chivalric heroes “historically,” and how to integrate them into the domain of modern military histories. To put a finer point on it, Voltaire's first kingly biography is grappling with a fundamental epistemic question of how to make sense of Charles XII as a historical and literary figure, and how to properly recognize his existence through the medium of historiography. In order for us to get a better viewing angle on this particular issue, it is useful to consider the very instrument of Charles's demise—that is, the bullet itself—and how it enters into Voltaire's narrative.

The bullet that ended chivalry …

Bullets and firearms are, curiously enough, something of a motif in Histoire de Charles XII. From a broader intellectual perspective, it is not hard to understand why: Voltaire—whose incipient attention to the history of industrial and scientific development earned him the respect of Isaiah Berlin—is quite interested in the way firearms signaled the end of traditional military affairs such as they had existed since antiquity. More, in fact: Histoire de Charles XII is filled with observations about the impact of modern artillery in the social, economic, and political development of European kingdoms. This is particularly visible in Voltaire's analysis of Peter the Great, who, unlike Charles, integrated the development of modern artillery in an ambitious project of modernization both of the Russian Army and of Russia itself (a project that also included a renewal of the navy, the founding of St Petersburg, and a large-scale moral reeducation of Russian soldiers).

More importantly still, as a poet and storyteller, Voltaire is attentive to the way the existence of firearms interferes with the structure, tropes, and poetic sensibilities of traditional military narratives. Bluntly put, the question of how to write about heroism in a world riddled with bullets is central to the composition of Histoire de Charles XII. This question emerges as early as Book II, when the king—by then well into his first campaign against Russia, Denmark, and Poland—has his first encounter with muskets on the battlefield:

It is hard, especially for modern audiences, not to read this passage as humorous, and, knowing what is to come, as a kind of anticipation of Charles's own death much later in the narrative. Indeed, the same kind of sudden spurt of violence punctuates this moment, offering readers an early reminder that the rules of engagement have changed and that bullets may not obey the conventional pacing of traditional military encounters. As with the king's death scene, Voltaire demonstrates here, too, an interest in bullets as tools of poetic interruption, as a way to subvert and cut short readers’ expectations of a dramatic denouement.

And yet, this moment also signals Charles's own astonishing incompatibility with the world he lives in. In fact, if the king's response to the sound of flying bullets may appear as a moment of comical bravado, it also proves to be true within the poetic logic of Voltaire's narrative: bullets and canons would, indeed, provide a kind of bombastic, glorious fanfare to Charles's military adventures. The king himself is shot at a few different times in the early books of Histoire de Charles XII, somehow managing to get by unscathed.Footnote ⁵² In Book II, Voltaire gives us a particularly Candide-like episode, where one of the king's generals is killed by cannon fire while standing inches away from the king himself, and shortly after Charles tries to warn the man of the dangers of enemy cannonades. At this moment in the narrative, Voltaire cannot help but point out the effect of this extraordinary episode in Charles's own theatrical self-fashioning, remarking that

Finally, in Book VIII, we reach something of an absurd apotheosis of this motif, with the king refusing to stop dictating his letters to Sweden even as his camp is being torn apart by the enemy's cannons.Footnote ⁵⁴ In short, if bullets make music in the world of Histoire de Charles XII, it is music that Charles himself is able to dance to with unnatural skill; until, of course, he no longer is.

Given all of this dramatic buildup to Charles XII's seemingly bulletproof body, the death scene appears to indeed function as a kind of ironic resolution: an unexpected chord to end the book's poetic cadence. After so many brushes with death and so much disregard for the destructive power of firearms, it seems the times finally catch up with Charles XII's arrogance in definitive and brutal fashion, as one single shot, by a single anonymous sniper, is able to bring a sudden and unceremonious end to his saga. And yet, looking at the motif of bullets from the very start allows us to visualize Voltaire's first history from a significantly different angle. More specifically, it allows us to see that the fundamental poetic and epistemological problem permeating the first books of Histoire de Charles XII (and the later ones too) is not the problem of satire or mockery, but rather a more complicated question of how to preserve a history (and a “modern history” at that) turned “unbelievable.” This is true even as the book seemingly arrives at its satirical high point.

Voltaire's Thermopylae: Charles at Bender

As previously mentioned, readers of Charles XII have often pointed to Books V and VI as the moment when the veil of dignity is lifted and Voltaire's history reveals itself as a satire, as a piece of slander, or as a mock-heroic work. This is, in many ways, quite understandable. The evidence for these assumptions seems overwhelming at this point, with Charles, now a defeated and wounded warrior, quickly becoming a diplomatic problem for his Ottoman hosts. Issues begin when he attempts to turn said hosts into war allies and reignite his campaign against Russia and Poland, and from there they escalate into a crescendo of increasingly extravagant demands on the Swedish side and an increasingly heated relationship with local authorities at Bender. We reach something of a climax at the halfway point of Book VI, with the Ottoman pasha—under orders from the Sultan himself—laying siege to Charles's estate, after the king has refused to peacefully leave the empire and return to his kingdom (a trip that the Sultan, desperate not to break with rules of hospitality, was ready to pay for himself). One could even look at the more anecdotal elements of the narrative—a particularly vibrant one being Charles's utter ineptitude at his newly acquired hobby, chess—as indications that Voltaire's interests in his story have gone through a subtle but meaningful change.Footnote ⁵⁵

However, these debasing circumstances are but the backdrop to something altogether more important to Voltaire: the simple fact that the king, alongside an entourage of three hundred men (mostly composed of servants) was able to barricade himself in his own house and block the advances of the Ottoman pasha and two thousand Tartars and janissaries at his command. The number—and its literary genealogy—is likely not lost on Voltaire. Indeed, if Book VI can be considered a burlesque rendition of Herodotus’ narration of the “Battle of Thermopylae,” the comedy is itself less important than the reality that something so ludicrous happened in the recent past (as opposed to the nebulous and quasi-mythical world of Herodotean antiquity). Simply put, the episode at Bender forced the historian to confront—and more radically still, inhabit—the wild imagination of living witnesses who saw the implausible firsthand. Voltaire was not oblivious to this challenge:

It is important to acknowledge where this passage comes from: the very same article “History” which is frequently quoted as evidence of Voltaire's “lack of patience” towards the “incredible”—or worse still, lack of a refined historical imagination.

I would argue, however, that the words above show the opposite, namely a willingness to recognize the potential for the romanesque and the grotesque embedded into “historical truth.” In a sense, it is not surprising that Voltaire brings up the events at Bender alongside the famous story of the masque de fer, which Alexandre Dumas, roughly a century later, would make the subject of one of his most popular serialized novels. Both tales inhabited that liminal space between “the possible” and “the likely” that, to most neoclassical writers (and especially to encyclopédistes like Jaucourt and d'Alembert) gave life to most romans.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, both tales were also inescapably “historical” inasmuch as they were witnessed and relayed by multiple individuals. Thus, rather than playing the role of harsh “historical pyrrhonist,” quickly labeling as “poetic nonsense” anything that did not appear to him as plausible, we see Voltaire here as a resigned skeptic, willing to lay down his own suspicions and defenses in the face of eyewitnesses and of a well corroborated narrative (“il a bien fallu la croire”).Footnote ⁵⁸

The question of truth, then, seems to be resolved at an epistemic level. Poetically, however, Book VI still poses problems, for it also challenges one's willingness to surrender suspicion by piling up, in rapid succession, a series of events so extravagant that they muddle the distinction between the plausible and the implausible, as well as the distinction between the dignified and the farcical. Here we see Charles calmly playing chess with his captain after barricading his own house, seemingly unconcerned by the army outside. We see the king's servants (including, Voltaire makes it a point to mention, clerks, cooks, priests, and secretaries) being forced to take up defensive posts, “for with him [Charles] everyone was a soldier.”Footnote ⁵⁹ We see the king promoting a servant to captain on the spot, after the man suggests that the entourage move to a neighboring house to escape a fire that has broken out. We watch as the unprepared group of Swedes hold their ground for a whole day and manage to kill two hundred enemy soldiers. And, perhaps most impactfully, we see yet again Charles being shot at point blank during the skirmishes, but only losing a small piece of his ear (with the bullet going on to wound the man behind him much more severely).

These are just a few of many examples of events that, while not impossible to believe, do raise—perhaps playfully—a very real question of history's relationship with the implausible. As Anne Coudreuse suggests, Voltaire's definition of “historical truth” in Histoire de Charles XII is bound by a concern—at once ethical and aesthetic—with the hero's “character.”Footnote ⁶⁰ But she fails to acknowledge the complexities of the statement given that the actions of the character in question were, themselves, “well beyond the plausible” (“bien loin au delà du vraisemblable”).Footnote ⁶¹ Voltaire, however, was eminently aware of such complexities. One could even make the case that he sought to celebrate them here. As the burlesque adventures in Bender unfold, it is easy to forget the rather obvious fact that the same history could have been written without including any romanesque extravagance whatsoever. This is, in fact, the path other historians took when narrating the same events. As the editorial notes added to the 1878 edition of the text very helpfully state, “M. Norberg, who was not present at this adventure, has, in this particular part of his history, only copied the account of Voltaire; but he has mangled it. He has suppressed some interesting circumstances, and has not been able to justify the temerity of Charles XII.”Footnote ⁶² This assessment, if harsh (and perhaps a bit biased), is not altogether incorrect. While Book XIV of Nordberg's own history of Charles XII goes into great detail on the king's stay at Bender, his focus lies mostly on the diplomatic tensions that led to the siege, covering the battle itself in but a few pages and including none of the extravagant behavior that Voltaire's version of Charles XII displays.Footnote ⁶³

One certainly could, following Desfontaines and other critics of Histoire de Charles XII, assume that Voltaire's inclusion of such romanesque extravagances was part of a conscious effort to degrade the seriousness of a historical narrative and transform it into a silly adventure that could only cater to the lesser intellects of the bourgeois masses. And in fairness, it is not obvious, from reading his kingly biography, how Voltaire would think to defend himself from such accusations. In fact, his ending to Book VI is quite vague on what one may take away from the affair at Bender: “It was on the 12th of February, 1713, that this strange event happened—an event that was followed by very remarkable consequences.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Still, one could find an alternative (and more redemptive) explanation for Book VI in the simple fact that, to Voltaire, an encounter with “strangeness” was a common feature of history as a narrative of the great and the extraordinary. This encounter was, of course, not inevitable: Louis XIV's magnanimous reign, to touch on the philosophe's preferred example of “grandeur” in modern history, remained firmly planted in the realm of historical plausibility, even as it emerged as a thoroughly rare and extraordinary occurrence in the tapestry of world events.Footnote ⁶⁵ Still, grandeur, to Voltaire, was a complicated category that, while necessary for historical accounts to achieve their poetic identity, also pushed history itself away from the familiar waters of the dignified and the easily believable. With that in mind, I can move into some concluding remarks.