Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 77B. Œuvres de 1775–1776 by Voltaire (review)

Volume 77B includes eight texts produced by Voltaire from his château in Ferney during the years 1775 and 1776. This collection displays the author’s continued efforts, despite his advanced age and remote location, to disturb the political and philosophical bedrock of both the French government and, of course, the Catholic Church. Despite their chronological proximity and largely political overtones, these works, together with their critical introductions, embody a wide variation of form and tone that celebrates Voltaire’s deep and multifaceted engagement with social progress. The careful approach of the Voltaire Foundation’s talented editors witnesses their dedication to a lasting establishment of these texts, some of which have not been edited in over one hundred years.

Critical introductions furnish each of the eight works with a bibliography of authorized editions, as well as a scrupulous accounting of the circumstances of the work’s composition, publication and reception. The Lettres chinoises, indiennes et tartares comprise by far the largest part of the volume, and, as Haydn Mason’s preface wonderfully states, it is likely the most important as well. This work, at first blush only a thinly-veiled response to Cornelius De Pauw’s takedown of idealistic Sinophiles, displays Voltaire’s voluminous, if only second-hand, knowledge of the Eastern civilizations in question. Yet the intention of the Lettres chinoises remains elusive; through a polyphonic labyrinth of genre and register, the text travels across time and space, piling up religious convictions culled from the eponymous cultures, the accretion of which breeds only contradiction and undermines any claim to veracity or priority. “[I]l est absolument égal pour la conduite de la vie qu’une chose soit vraie, ou qu’elle passe pour vraie” (124). The structure functions, as stated in the introduction, as “un antidote aux superstitions, au charlatanisme (97).” Western dogmas recede into the background as Voltaire traces the much older religions of India and China, but these latter two will receive their share of sarcasm as well. The purported search for religious truth will discover only negation. Most perplexing is perhaps the summary divergence of the final letter, the entirety of which Voltaire devotes to an attack on an unfavorable critic. The reader will thus find great help sorting through this perplexing endeavor in the detailed introduction by Cotoni, Guy and Breathe, which closely examines the incongruities of the text as well as possible areas of cohesion.

Ralph A. Nablow provides ample context for an informed reading of Le Temps présent, Voltaire’s “poème engagé” extolling the merits of the newly appointed minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and especially the latter’s work toward the political rehabilitation of the peasant class through the abolition of the corvée. The critical introduction’s succinct analysis of Voltaire’s verse and language emphasizes the author’s ability to blend art with combat. Nablow cites two entertaining examples of the poem’s reception, but it would be interesting to know whether which—if either—of these contrary impressions might be more representative of the general opinion.

The Requête au roi pour les serfs de Saint-Claude, etc. is Voltaire’s effort to reform mainmorte, a customary law of feudal servitude that the author likens to a form of legalized slavery. Robert Granderoute draws the reader’s attention to Voltaire’s deft stylistic choices that combine juridical overtones with pathetic lamentation in a writing that finds a balance between outright demand and humble suggestion. Granderoute points out the singularity of this rêquete from others of its category in that it addresses the king directly rather than through his assembly. Such a shift functions, as Granderoute aptly notes, to broaden the application of this work from merely political to philosophical questions on the relationships between the king, the subject, and the...