Table Of ContentVOLTAIRE
Historian
VOLTAIRE
Historian
BY
J. H. BRUMFITT
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
V/S V6^ V /V70
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© Oxford University Press 1958
First published in the
Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs
1958
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN
(WITH NEW PREFACE)
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY VIVIAN RIDLER
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
1970
PREFACE
his book first appeared in 1958, and is here reprinted with a
bare minimum of corrections. In form and style it would no
JL doubt have benefited from a more complete revision. How¬
ever, my views on the significance of Voltaire’s historical writings
have not changed appreciably in the intervening years, and I take
this as an indication that the time for such a revision has not yet
arrived. Instead, I shall content myself, in this preface, with a short
review of some of the more important works on Voltaire as an
historian which have appeared in recent years and which amplify,
modify, and in some cases contradict, my own arguments.
In the first place, new editions are now available of many of
the historical writings themselves. The most valuable of these
are the work of Rene Pomeau. His Pleiade (Euvres historiques,
which includes all the historical writings except the Essai sur les
mceurs and lesser works of controversy, was published in 1957. It
was followed, in 1963, by his edition of the Essai itself (Classiques
Gamier, 2 vols.). Though neither of these is fully ‘critical’ in the
most rigid sense of the term, both give all the more important
variants and have extensive introductions and notes. The edition of
the Essai is particularly rich in illustrative material and in ex¬
planatory notes drawn largely from information in Voltaire’s
library at Leningrad. For the general reader, these volumes are
likely to remain, for a long time, the most reliable standard text.
For the specialist, however, they may soon be superseded by the
relevant volumes of the new Complete Works of Voltaire, an edition
which is now being prepared by an international team of scholars
(M. Pomeau is prominent among them) and published under the
aegis of Theodore Besterman and the Institut et Musee Voltaire of
Geneva. As I write, only one volume of the historical writings has
yet appeared: my own edition of La Philosophie de Vhistoire. How¬
ever, there is much to interest the student of Voltairian historio¬
graphy in the two volumes of Besterman’s new, and much augmen¬
ted, edition of the Notebooks, and some of the major histories are
likely to be published in the next year or two. They will contain a
fully critical text and an extensive commentary.
Two major studies of Voltaire the historian have appeared since
my own was published; they are both considerably longer than
mine, and treat some questions much more fully. The first, Furio
Diaz’s Voltaire storico (1958), is particularly illuminating in its
161848
PREFACE
detailed discussion of Voltaire as an historian of modern times.
Diaz demonstrates the link between his political thinking and his
historical writing, showing the extent to which the latter is a
function of the former. He is a very sympathetic commentator,
and his case for regarding Voltaire as a historical thinker of the first
magnitude with a flair for appreciating the dialectic of history is
powerfully argued, though his enthusiasm, to my mind, can some¬
times be excessive.
Diaz writes from an avowedly, though by no means dogmatic¬
ally, Marxist standpoint. So too does the author of the other major
study of Voltaire historian, Charles Rihs, whose Voltaire: Re-
cherches sur les origines du materialisme historique was published
in 1962. However, their interpretations differ widely, for whereas
Diaz’s Voltaire is almost ‘pre-Marxist’-in his insight, Rihs’s is the
epitome of the ‘idealist’ historian and represents the antithesis of
Marx and the materialists. The two cases are ably argued, though
that of Diaz seems to me the more convincing. However, rather
than accepting either view, it seems to me better sense (and
possibly better ‘Marxism’) to conclude that Voltaire was simul¬
taneously both ‘idealist’ and ‘materialist’—in short that he reflected
all that was most active in the ideological conflicts of his day.
Rihs’s book has much else to recommend it; it is particularly
thorough in those fields where my own coverage is most super¬
ficial, especially in its discussion of aspects of the development of
historical thought from Saint Augustine onwards and of the way
in which Voltaire absorbs, modifies, and at times rejects this
tradition.
Of the many shorter contributions to our understanding of
Voltaire the historian, I wish to mention only a few. O. R. Taylor
has given us a first class edition of what might be called Voltaire’s
first historical work, La Henriade (Studies on Voltaire and the Eight¬
eenth Century, Vols. XXVIII-XL, 1965) and has developed his
views on the historiographical significance of the work in an
article in The Age of the Enlightenment (1967). Enzo Caramaschi has
examined the relationship between Voltaire and an important pre¬
cursor in his ‘Du Bos et Voltaire’ (Studies, Vol. X, 1959). The
same relationship also plays its part in an interesting study of
Voltaire’s attitude to the Renaissance, to be found in Franco
Simone’s II Rinascimento francese (1965). Basil Guy has studied
afresh Voltaire’s attitude to one of his utopias in ‘The French
Image of China before and after Voltaire’ (Studies, Vol. XXI,
PREFACE
1963). Finally, insight into the nature of Voltaire’s historical
artistry is to be found in Lionel Gossman’s ‘Voltaire’s Charles XII:
history into art’ (Studies, Vol. XXV, 1963).
In short, this book is already out of date in some of its details.
In its essentials, however, it still remains, I believe, a valid
analysis of Voltaire historian.
J. H. B.
St. Andrews
March 1970
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS X
INTRODUCTION I
I. APPRENTICESHIP
5
II. VOLTAIRE AND HIS PREDECESSORS 26
- The Humanist Historians 26
Bossuet
3°
The Sceptics
32
Fontenelle
34
Fenelon and Boulainvilliers
36
Bolingbroke 40
III. SOCIAL HISTORY 46
\
Le Siecle de Louis XIV 00
The Essai sur les mceurs 61
Other Works 70
IV. UNIVERSAL HISTORY 76
Cosmopolitan History 76
The Remote Past 84
V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 95
" The Purpose and Nature of History 95
Causation and Development 104 —~
Voltaire and Montesquieu hi
Determinism and Progress ■/ 121
VI. HISTORICAL METHOD 129
Sources and Critical Method 129
Richelieu's Testament Politique i47
Form and Style 160
CONCLUSION 165
BIBLIOGRAPHY 170
INDEXES i75
ABBREVIATIONS
Except where otherwise stated, references to the works of Voltaire
are to the edition by L. Moland (Paris, Gamier, 1877-85, 52 vols.). In
such references, volume and page number alone will be given (e.g.
xvi. 177).
References to the edition of Voltaire's Correspondence by Th. Bester-
man (Geneva, 1953- ) will have the same form except that they will
be preceded by the abbreviation: Best.
When works are referred to in the footnotes by their short titles,
fuller information will be found in the bibliography.
INTRODUCTION
W
hether or not Voltaire is, as some of his more enthu¬
siastic admirers have asserted,1 the father of modern
historical writing, he is certainly the most typical and the
most universal of the historians of the Enlightenment. Moreover,
recent studies have shown how unjustified was the nineteenth-
century tendency to dismiss Enlightenment historiography as
being fundamentally anti-historical.2 It is true that its exponents
felt little reverence for the past, and that they rarely succeeded in
dissociating themselves from the problems of their own times. It
is true that their attachment to the mechanistic science and psy¬
chology of their age often\led them to ignore the variations in
human conduct throughout the centuries^ and that their belief in
the new society which they were attempting to create led to a
contemptuous attitude towards earlier forms of society\and, in
particular, to a systematic disparagement of the Middle Ages. But if
they were often lacking in historical imagination, they nevertheless
brough^jTouL_a.profound-Sf evolution in historical thought They
created a new type of social history, interesting themselves in laws
and constitutions, in economic progress, in the arts and sciences.
They strove to separate history from legend and to make the past
appear as rational as the present. They were unwilling to confine
themselves within national traditions, or even within the European
Christian tradition, but aimed at being truly universal and at show¬
ing how all nations had contributed to the progress of mankind.
If Enlightenment historiography was a natural result of the social
and philosophical theories of th.tphilosoph.es, it was also a conscious
reaction against the historical writing of the previous century. The
majority of seventeenth-century historians continued the humanist
tradition of the Renaissance,3 and sought, above all, to follow the
precepts of Cicero and the examples of Livy and Sallust. They
aimed at moral instruction and artistic excellence. To achieve the
1 e.g. Lanson, Voltaire, p. 132, and Brailsford, Voltaire, p. 84.
2 See Dilthey, ‘Das i8te Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt’; Meinecke,
Die Entstehung des Historismus, and Cassirer, Die Philosophic der Aufkldrung. One
of the most recent defences of Enlightenment historiography is to be found in
Luporini’s Voltaire e le ‘Lettres Philosophiques’.
3 For a general account of this development, see Fueter, Geschichte der neueren
Historiographie.
