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VOLTAIRE AND THE NECESSITY OF MODERN HISTORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2009

PIERRE FORCE
PIERRE FORCE*
Affiliation:
Department of French, Columbia University E-mail: pf3@columbia.edu
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Abstract

This article revisits what has often been called the “naive presentism” of Voltaire's historical work. It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for Voltaire's deliberate focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history, his refusal to “make allowances for time” in judging the past, and his extreme selectiveness in determining the relevance of past events to world history. Voltaire's historical practice is put in the context of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and considered in a tradition of universal history going back to Bossuet and leading up to nineteenth-century German historicism. Paradoxically, Voltaire is a major figure in the history of historiography not in spite of his presentism (as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay have argued), but because of it.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 457 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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57 Voltaire, Conseils à un journaliste, 245.

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63 Ibid.

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65 Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, in idem, Oeuvres historiques, 1028.

66 Ibid.

67 Voltaire, article on “Antiquité,” in idem, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, 1: 299.

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75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., 248.

77 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, vol. 2 (1719), (Paris: Mariette, 1733), sect. 12, 134. On the complex relationship between Dubos and Voltaire see Caramaschi, Enzo, “Du Bos et Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 10 (1959), 113–236Google Scholar.

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83 Ibid.

84 Voltaire, “Catalogue de la plupart des écrivains français qui ont paru dans le siècle de Louis XIV, pour servir à l'histoire littéraire de ce temps” in idem, Oeuvres historiques, 1133–1214.

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93 Voltaire, An Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), in The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 3B (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 308.

94 Ibid., 313.

95 Ibid.

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97 Voltaire, An Essay on Epic Poetry, 314.

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100 Fontenelle, Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, in idem, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1688) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 169.

101 Ibid.

102 Voltaire, article on “Anciens et modernes,” in idem, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, 1: 260.

103 Ibid.

104 Voltaire, An Essay on Epic Poetry, 367.

105 Article on “équité,” in Nicot, Trésor de la langue française (1606).

106 Voltaire, “Remarques sur l'histoire,” in idem, Oeuvres historiques, 44.

107 Preface for vol. 3 of the Walther edition (1754) in Essai sur les moeurs, 2: 883.

108 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 6.

109 Ibid., 5.

110 Ibid., 124.

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125 Dubos, Réflexions critiques, vol. 2, sect. 39, 566. The “English poet” is Addison (The Spectator, 3 Sept. 1711).

126 Dubos, Réflexions critiques, vol. 2, sect. 34, 499.

127 Ibid., sect. 34, 502.

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142 Ibid., 208.

143 Ibid.

144 Ibid.

145 Ibid., 209.

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147 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 197.

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