Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 45B: Œuvres de 1753–1757 (II): Mélanges de 1756 (review)

Readers are undoubtedly familiar with the Voltaire Foundation’s ever-expanding critical edition of Voltaire’s collected works, which has changed the landscape of eighteenth-century scholarship. Volume 45B focuses on 1756, when the brothers Cramer published the Mélanges de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie in close collaboration with the author. Coming on the heels of Voltaire’s two great historical works, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) and L’Histoire universelle (1753), this collection might give the impression of a writer capitalizing on his success by recycling unused work. Nicholas Cronk, however, makes a compelling case for considering the mélanges as a bona fide genre in which Voltaire exercised his taste for ‘de petits chapitres’, short variations on themes that enabled maximum flexibility in tone, approach, and subject matter. Cronk further suggests that Voltaire’s predilection for brevity prompts us to consider the deeper connections between the various genres of Voltaire’s corpus, which here range from the moral tale Les Deux Consolés, to the erudite trilogy Du siècle de Constantin, to essays on such topics as Des langues and Jusqu’à quel point on doit tromper le peuple. A variegated Voltaire emerges from this volume, detesting the Emperor Constantine while praising Julian as a ‘philosophe’; dismissing Dante’s Divine Comedy as a ‘salmigondis’ while re-fashioning Socrates as a deist; opposing Descartes’s philosophical ‘roman’ to Newton’s science. Voltaire’s famous misrepresentation of Rousseau’s first discourse appears in a new light when set against essays such as De la chimère du souverain bien or De la population de l’Amérique. We learn that the celebrated phrase that concludes Candide — ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ — is a paraphrase from the Emperor Diocletian, who claimed to have begun living only once he had renounced worldly power. And we share Voltaire’s indignation at the lingering practice of burning witches, in Würzburg in 1749 and, as the editors note, as late as 1776 in Poland, 1780 in Seville, and 1782 in Switzerland. Thanks to Philip Stewart’s scrupulous annotation, the picaresque-inspired Histoire des voyages de Scarmentado, in which the future Candide appears in miniature, comes alive as a satire even if the contemporary references have ceased to be common knowledge. The shortcomings of brevity are also evident, especially in Des Juifs, in which Voltaire attempted to consider the Jewish people as a secular ‘nation’ outside the framework of biblical history. Marie-Hélène Cotoni’s excellent introduction to Des Juifs considers even-handedly the question of Voltaire’s anti-Semitism from the perspective of his contemporaries who criticized him for projecting stereotypes as ancient historical truths and who questioned the plausibility of defining the Jewish people as a nation. Cotoni’s introduction is one of several essays that set out a research agenda to be pursued and a bibliography that can feature in any number of courses on eighteenth-century culture. ‘De petits chapitres’ these may be but, as this volume convincingly shows, Voltaire’s brevity — his conspicuous silence on certain issues as much as his polemics — set the agenda of international debate for much of the eighteenth century.