Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 71A. Voltaire éditeur. Œuvres de 1769–1770 (I), and: Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 71B. Voltaire éditeur. Œuvres de 1769–1770 (II) (review)

J.-M. Moureaux supplies a preface to these two volumes, which contain five texts varying in character and edited by Voltaire for various reasons. Voltaire apparently edited Des Périers's Cymbalum mundi, which he considered unreadable, in order to discredit the absurd censorship to which it had been subjected. The bulk of critical opinion has long favoured the view that the work was innocuous. Nicholas Cronk, however, who here re-edits Voltaire's edition, finds in a note of Bayle's to his Dictionnaire article on Des Périers only a pretence of defending the Cymbalum, since Bayle rehearses all the accusations of heresy to which the work gave rise. Bayle's judicious note in fact warns against the potentially subversive implications that satire of superstition may have for true religion. In contrast to the Cymbalum mundi, the Souvenirs de Mme de Caylus is an attractively written work of 'miscellaneous recollections of what she observed or was told by Mme de Maintenon about the court of Louis XIV in the 1680s and 1690s'. Janet Godden, who edited the Souvenirs with the late Virgil Topazio, suggests that the principal interest of Mme de Caylus's work in Voltaire's eyes may lie in its countering various inaccuracies put about by La Beaumelle, editor of writings of Mme de Maintenon. Nicholas Cronk edited the Journal de la cour de Louis XIV of Dangeau, to which he offers a substantial and illuminating introduction. Voltaire's edition is 'heavily abridged and with often ironic notes and a postface which in part disparage Dangeau's work'. Its value for Voltaire lies not in the quality of the writing or in the writer's personal opinions or reactions but in the fact that his memoirs 'sont remplis de mille faits que taisent les gazettes … [ils] serviront beaucoup à qui voudra écrire plus solidement, pour l'exactitude et la chronologie et pour éviter la confusion'. The two works which make up the second volume are editions in an unusual or extended sense. Voltaire's Sophonisbe is in fact his own version of the play, more regular perhaps than Mairet's but less dramatic and moving, though not without a certain Cornelian nobility. It suffers from an excessive concern for an idealized purity of diction. Christopher Todd subjects Voltaire's play to a meticulous analysis and shows that it has not fared well with critical opinion in comparison with Mairet's. Voltaire's edition of and commentary on the Discours de l'empereur Julien contre les chrétiens is a complex work in which he conveys his hostility to Christianity in commenting on the Marquis d'Argens's edition of Julian, entitled Défense du paganisme, which itself expresses obliquely d'Argens's own miscreance. Voltaire's aim appears to be to deflect responsibility for his subversive message on to d'Argens. This present critical edition of the Discours derives from José-Michel Moureaux's magisterial and more extensive work published in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 322 (1994) and admirably reviewed by Marie-Hélène Cotoni in FS, L (1996), 200-01.