The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (review)

Before examining The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, a glimpse into the Cambridge Companions series’ catalogue is instructive. Of the more than one hundred authors à l’affiche, almost all are British or American; and most belong to the twentieth century. Disappointingly, the only French writers featured are Camus, Proust, Flaubert, and Molière. This recent addition of Voltaire is welcome.

Research into Voltaire’s life and work has been profoundly transformed since the 1950s. This overhaul is largely the result of the efforts of one man, the English bibliographer Theodore Besterman (1904–76). Besterman founded the Musée et Institut Voltaire in Geneva in 1951, and his initiative inaugurated a new wave of Voltaire scholarship. In 1952, he published Voltaire’s Notebooks, and then, from 1953–65, the historic first edition of the massive Correspondance. Besterman also founded in the mid-1950s the scholarly journal Studies on Voltaire, now known as SVEC. Finally, in 1965, he created the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford, and, in 1968, inaugurated the only critical edition of Voltaire’s Complete Works undertaken since the nineteenth century. That edition is scheduled to be completed in 2018. Given the Foundation’s commitment to Voltaire studies, it is not surprising that its dynamic director, Nicholas Cronk, should have undertaken The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire.

Cronk recruited the volume’s contributors from among the world’s leading Voltaire scholars. He is also responsible for “one and a half ” of the collection’s 14 articles, three of which he has translated. Cronk also pens the volume’s introductory essay—a piece worthy of Lytton Strachey—which draws attention to Voltaire’s ever-changing image from the eighteenth century onward, and which implicitly frames the volume’s central theme. What does Voltaire stand for today? What can we make of his prodigious literary output? At the same time, Cronk invites us to consider Voltaire’s latter-day image as l’homme aux Calas, the embodiment of Enlightenment values.

Of Voltaire’s monumental oeuvre Cronk writes, “Voltaire was a master of virtually all literary genres. His writings include poetry in many different styles (epic, mock epic, ode, epistle, satire, and much occasional verse, theatre, comedy, even opera librettos), history, short prose works in a variety of forms (tales, dialogues, satires, pamphlets); and for good measure a scientific treatise” (3). One of the book’s more fascinating themes is, therefore, the protean nature of its subject. Starting with Geoffrey Turnovsky’s “The Making of a Name, the Life of Voltaire” (17–30), almost all the volume’s contributors try to come to terms with the many masks and voices assumed by Voltaire over his long and sometimes turbulent career. The “essential” Voltaire can nevertheless still prove elusive.

The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire gives little space to Voltaire’s poetry. His œuvre maîtresse, La Henriade, is mentioned only in passing; likewise the burlesque Pucelle d’Orléans. As for the twenty-odd plays he wrote, Russell Goulbourne’s “Voltaire’s Masks: Theatre and Theatricality” (93–103) reminds us that, ironically, posterity has relegated his dramatic works to oblivion. And this, in spite of Voltaire being regarded in his own lifetime as “France’s, even Europe’s greatest dramatist” (94). What remains of Voltaire’s oeuvre, then, at least for the authors of The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, are the essays, the histories, the short prose works (including his novels), and the Correspondance.

One of the strengths of this collection of essays is that it treats Voltaire’s works thematically within the framework of his thinking. Only Candide and the Correspondance are discussed as separate entities. Thus, John Leigh’s “Voltaire and the Myth of England” (79–92) touches on the Lettres Philosophiques, the Histoire de Charles xii, as well as the Histoire de Jenni, ou l’athée et le sage, La Henriade, and La Pucelle d’Orléans. Leigh is not alone in identifying Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques...