Mémoires pour servir à la vie de M. de Voltaire, écrits par lui-même (review)

Until quite recently, Voltaire’s autobiographical writings attracted relatively little attention from scholars. Of the trio (Paméla, Mémoires, and the Commentaire historique), Paméla was unknown until André Magnan’s researches appeared in 1983, while the Commentaire did not even figure in the voluminous Dictionnaire général de Voltaire (2003). As for the Mémoires, they were generally seen as an outright attack on Frederick of Prussia, after Voltaire had suffered humiliation on Frederick’s orders in Frankfurt. Theodore Besterman’s comprehensive biography (1969) deemed them to be of ‘limited’ value. But latterly, Jonathan Mallinson’s critical editions of the Mémoires and of Paméla in the Voltaire Foundation’s Œuvres complètes (2010) have convincingly established them as part of the Voltaire canon. Now, the edition by Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h has taken the process still further. This study commands admiration in every aspect. The author meticulously pinpoints the tempus a quo and the tempus ad quem in the dating of the Mémoires (a posthumous work, and itself made up of several parts) before coming to the ‘Finalité des Mémoires’: the guiding principle underlying the work. While not denying the retaliatory aspect, she considers such a reading to be simplistic and superficial (p. 29). There follows a detailed account of the devices employed by Voltaire: idealization, derision, omissions, caricature. Nor is Frederick the only target: ‘Frédéric II n’est, tout compte fait, pas traité plus mal que d’autres’ (p. 46). The king was perfidious, unscrupulous, rode roughshod over opponents both inside and outside Prussia. However, this is no ‘règlement de compte’ but rather a ‘mise au point’ (p. 36). The final judgement is full of ambivalent irony: ‘Tous les défauts de l’homme disparurent devant la gloire du héros’ (p. 200). This analysis stresses Frederick’s complex personality, a singular ‘contraste de stoïcisme et d’épicurisme’ (p. 39), yet another version of ‘les contradictions de ce monde’ (p. 202). Hellegouarc’h goes so far as to describe Frederick’s duplicity as ‘une certaine forme de sincérité’ (p. 36), a view that not every reader may share. As she points out, it is difficult to separate, in the liberties that Frederick takes with the truth, ‘le mobile affectif et le mobile littéraire’ (p. 44). This brilliant analysis of ambiguity in Frederick’s personality in the main section of the Mémoires is often reminiscent of Candide, which dates from roughly the same years. The editor has given us a study that, following on from the excellent account by Mallinson, has definitively shown the profound quality of this hitherto neglected work.