Voltaire and the Posture of Anonymity

Le mot écrire ne s'employe presque plus dans un grand nombre d'occasions, que pour désigner le style.

Jaucourt, "écrivain, auteur," Encyclopédie

Voltaire uses—and abuses—anonymity in complex ways that tell us much about how he projects his style of authorship and so constructs his thought. His practices are paradoxical, not least because his instantly recognisable style would seem to jeopardize any attempt at anonymity. Is total anonymity desirable or even possible for Voltaire?

Anonymity in the eighteenth century is unlike anonymity in the twenty-first. The signature on the title page is nowadays so much the norm that any departure from that norm tends to be seen as a provocation. Thus O: A Presidential Novel (2011), a fictional account of the Obama White House, actually announces itself as "by Anonymous"—a marketing tactic which has successfully ensured that at the time of writing speculation is rife about the author's identity. Anonymous works in the Ancien Régime are not always provocative in this way, and they fall broadly into two categories: firstly, there are those works, we might term them "genuinely anonymous," like Système de la nature, where a patent pseudonym ("M. Mirabaud") is indeed used to protect the author (the baron d'Holbach) from possible prosecution; sometimes the anonymity is subsequently exploded, in other cases it is maintained. Swift tried his best to hide his authorship of certain works, famously leaving manuscripts on the doorstep of his publisher under cover of darkness. Secondly, there are those works, we might term them "technically anonymous," like the Maximes (1665) published by the aristocrat La Rochefoucauld, where the author's name is absent from the title page but perfectly well known to all or most readers. Diderot makes the point that De l'esprit des lois ran into so many editions because of the author's reputation:

Je suppose que l'Esprit des lois fût la première production d'un auteur inconnu et relégué par la misère à un quatrième étage. Malgré toute l'excellence de cet ouvrage, je doute qu'on en eût fait trois éditions; et il y en a peut-être vingt. Les dix-neuf vingtièmes de ceux qui l'ont acheté sur le nom, la réputation, l'état et les talents de l'auteur, et qui le citent sans cesse sans l'avoir lu et sans l'avoir entendu, le connaîtraient à peine de nom.¹

Fair enough, but Diderot might have added that the reputation which ensured high sales was in no way inhibited by the fact that the first edition of De l'esprit des lois (1748) appeared without Montesquieu's name on the title page.

In this latter example, anonymity is an aesthetic choice, part of an author's deliberately constructed self-image. Anonymity is certainly, sometimes, a legal safeguard for the author of a dangerous work, but it is always more than that. It can be a publicity strategy, a means of drawing attention to a work,² and it raises ludic considerations as well as legal ones (especially so in the case of that variant of anonymity which is pseudonymy). Anonymity should be seen therefore as one means, among others, of signing a work.

The Legal Signature: Ownership of Voice and Strategies of the Title Page

In 1738, Cideville, a close friend from his early years, sent to Voltaire an ode which he wanted to publish in the Mercure. Voltaire asks the abbé Moussinot to send the poem to M. de la Roque, the editor of the journal; he is perhaps too embarrassed to do this himself, as the ode contains lavish praise of Voltaire. And as Voltaire gives instructions to Moussinot, he is careful to explain how Cideville's authorship should be indicated: "Il ne convient pas que son nom soit tout du long à la tête. La lettre initiale suffit" (4 August 1738, D1572).³ What is interesting here is the care taken by Voltaire in the precise signing of his friend's poem. The "legal" signature consists in theory of the...