"Initiators of Discursive Practices": Authorship, Attribution, and Intent in the Debates between Philosophes and Anti-philosophes (1760)

In his seminal work, L'œil vivant, Jean Starobinski theorizes on how pseudonymity—the false attribution of authorship—affects a reader. He writes: "Lorsqu'un homme se masque ou se revêt d'un pseudonyme, nous nous sentons défiés. Cet homme se refuse à nous. Et en revanche nous voulons savoir."² It is probable that Starobinski, a master at looking at the pourquoi behind writers (in this case, he is examining Stendhal), meant "readers" by "nous" in "nous nous sentons defiés" and "the author's name" by the word "savoir" in "nous voulons savoir." Starobinski gestures towards a type of miscommunication between the author's intent and the reader's desires. Specific miscommunications between readers and writers, as I see it, provide intriguing contexts to examine more general problems in literary criticism and its history.

What follows is an attempt to show the unintended magnitude of Starobinski's comment on pseudonymity both in the specific context of Voltaire's 1760 staging of the play, Le café ou l'Écossaise, and in larger debates in the emerging fields of anonymity, pseudonymity, and attribution studies. Voltaire's use of multiple pseudonyms before and after releasing L'Ecossaise, a comédie sérieuse in which Voltaire attacks his enemy Elie-Cathérine Fréron, supports his philosophe friends at a crucial moment in history, and exemplifies his taste for serious comedy and British drama calls into question traditional takes on pseudonymity, anonymity, and attribution by refusing to fit into the binary arguments of anonymous vs. attributed, and authorial intent vs. the reader's control. As we shall see, a network of competing interests beyond Voltaire's sought to control, manipulate, and even initiate a host of discourses about the play.

Over the next few pages, I will analyze the function of pseudonymity within the specificity of 1760 France—at the peak of a cultural war between philosophes and anti-philosophes, between authors or supporters of the Encyclopédie and their numerous detractors. After having underlined the individuality of L'Ecossaise, my goal is to then examine Voltaire's use of pseudonyms against the backdrop of a more contemporary debate on authorship and anonymity: the fierce disagreement between post-structuralist critics and their recent detractors over the value, and even the possibility, of attributing authorial intent to a literary work.³ Through a careful reassessment of Michel Foucault's concept of attribution in "What is an Author?," I will then conclude by offering a meeting point—a place of joint critical investigation—between post-structuralist scholars, who sometimes ignore the historical specificity of literary reception, and recent attribution scholars, who sometimes determine the value of a literary work by that work's adherence to or divergence from rigid ideas of literary norms or an author's "voice" during a given, historical epoch.

The study of pseudonymity as a social act—an interpersonal, often conflictual competition to lend meaning to a work between at least two people—merits just as much critical inquiry as attempts to uncover a rational reason—the authorial intent—behind pseudonymic practice. By studying pseudonymity as inherently social, scholars at present could provide a complementary angle to studies that ask: "who really wrote this text?" or "why did he or she use a pseudonym?"—studies that still fill the pages of academic journals today and that often (and in this critic's opinion, overly) simplify the complexities of a writer's various motivations and a reader's multiple processes of interpretation.

In France, the middle of the eighteenth century was a tumultuous period in the Republic of Letters. Despite the early popular successes of philosophe works like Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1750) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi des hommes (1754), the intellectual climate became decidedly anti-philosophique⁴ during the second half of the 1750s. The setbacks suffered by philosophes were numerous: Rousseau parted...