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  • Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 72: Œuvres de 1770–1771
  • Thomas Wynn
Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 72: Œuvres de 1770–1771. Edited by Michael Hawcroft and others. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011. xxxviii + 386 pp. Hb £99.00; €115.00; $160.00.

Writing in the Correspondance littéraire in November 1771, Grimm identified the two subjects that most preoccupied Voltaire: ‘il craint que les portes du Système de la nature ne prévalent contre le roc sur lequel il a fondé l’église de Ferney; il craint que la tragédie en prose de M. Sedaine, si elle est jouée, ne fasse tort aux tragédies en vers’. This volume testifies to the impact that d’Holbach’s work of atheist materialism (published in 1769) had on Voltaire’s deism, and conveys the abiding dismay expressed by the patriarch in the face of perceived artistic decline. The volume opens with the thought-provoking essay ‘Le Dieu de Voltaire’, in which Gerhardt Stenger considers the development of Voltaire’s theology; echoing materialist philosophers, he adopts fatalism, and denies both the soul’s immortality and divine omnipotence, although he holds on to God not as an object of faith but as a ‘conjecture hautement vraisemblable’ (p. xxv) without which social order is impossible. Stenger identifies two discourses on God in Voltaire’s work: the first speaks to the ‘sages’ of an abstract deity, whereas the second presents to the masses what Grimm ridicules as a ‘rémunérateur vengeur’ (p. 127). In the pamphlet Dieu: réponse au Système de la nature (edited by Stenger and Jeroom Vercruysse) Voltaire attacks d’Holbach’s atheism by insisting that God is the universe’s primary cause and motor, and that religion may act as a necessary social and political restraint; he hoped thereby to convince the authorities that not all the philosophes were dangerous subversives, although, founding his argument on sentiment rather than on proof, he left himself open to ridicule from contemporaries. Jean Dagen notes in his excellent introduction to the Lettres de Memmius à Ciceron that at this time Voltaire returns to his intellectual sources, reassessing those who inspire him and those whom he refutes, and here d’Holbach appears both as enemy of public order and as stimulating opponent. Dagen illuminates Voltaire’s multiple allusions and debts, deftly unpicking the knots and inconsistencies in his argument. Just as Voltaire attacks atheism as a threat to the social order, so in four other texts does he contend that the people may be tricked, misled, and controlled in different ways: in Fonte (edited by Gillian Pink) and Le Père Nicodème et Jeannot (edited by Sylvain Menant and Georges Pilard) he turns to the lies peddled by organized religion and the clergy; and in Au Roi en son Conseil and the Nouvelle Requête au Roi (edited by Robert Granderoute) he condemns the serfdom maintained within France by the Church. Voltaire’s aesthetic stock-taking is obvious in the satirical poem Les Deux Siècles (edited by John Iverson), in which contemporary science, philosophy, and literature are disparagingly compared to the triumphs of Louis XIV’s reign. Such stocktaking is also in evidence in the tragedy Les Pélopides (edited by Michael Hawcroft and Christopher Todd); a pastiche of many other works, this play was composed in response to Sedaine’s prose tragedy Maillard, ou Paris sauvé. Evidencing Voltaire’s continued though not always positive engagement with contemporary thought and culture, this stimulating volume is a fine addition to the Œuvres complètes.

Thomas Wynn
Durham University
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