Core and Peripheral Civilizations: Voltaire's Tragic Vision and Historical Thinking in L'Orphelin de la Chine (1755)

This article examines Voltaire's presentation in historical and dramatic texts of what he understood as instances of the progress of "human spirit" across world history, expressed as periods of confrontation between civilized (core) and barbarian (peripheral) spaces. One of the author's later tragedies, L'Orphelin de la Chine (1755), serves as a case study to illustrate how Voltaire creatively rendered this core/periphery dynamic by transporting it to a place of influence and power beyond Europe, that is, beyond the period's more typical, orientalist depictions of western and non-western confrontation to a purely non-western space. Voltaire inscribed confrontation within the play's two communities of barbarian (Mongol) and civilized (imperial China) peoples of the East and the values their respective worlds embodied. Moreover, Voltaire problematized this dynamic by destabilizing the hierarchy of values, elevating those of the periphery to the center or core and creating a liminal space within the conflict where core and periphery seem to meld into a new locus of cultural assimilation and/or appropriation. In concluding remarks, by briefly exploring China's historical record of conquest and assimilation during two important periods (medieval and early modern), we discover that Voltaire's formulation of a core/periphery civilizing dynamic may have unknowingly confirmed the historical record.