Voltaire: Historian


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VOLTAIRE Historian VOLTAIRE Historian BY J. H. BRUMFITT OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS V/S t /V70 V6^ V Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W. i GLASGOW NEW YORK CAPE TOWN SALISBURY BOMBAY TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON IBADAN NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM LUSAKA CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE LAHORE HONG KONG ADDIS ABABA DACCA TOKYO © Oxford University Press 1958 First published in the Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs 1958 REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY (WITH NEW IN GREAT BRITAIN PREFACE) AT THE UNIVERSITY BY VIVIAN PRESS, OXFORD RIDLER PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 1970 PREFACE his book first appeared in 1958, and is here reprinted with a bare minimum of corrections. In form and style it would no JL doubt have benefited from a more complete revision. How¬ ever, my views on the significance of Voltaire’s historical writings have not changed appreciably in the intervening years, and I take this as an indication that the time for such a revision has not yet arrived. Instead, I shall content myself, in this preface, with a short review of some of the more important works on Voltaire as an historian which have appeared in recent years and which amplify, modify, and in some cases contradict, my own arguments. In the first place, new editions are now available of many of the historical writings themselves. The most valuable of these are the work of Rene Pomeau. His Pleiade (Euvres historiques, which includes all the historical writings except the Essai sur les mceurs and lesser works of controversy, was published in 1957. It was followed, in 1963, by his edition of the Essai itself (Classiques Gamier, 2 vols.). Though neither of these is fully ‘critical’ in the most rigid sense of the term, both give all the more important variants and have extensive introductions and notes. The edition of the Essai is particularly rich in illustrative material and in ex¬ planatory notes drawn largely from information in Voltaire’s library at Leningrad. For the general reader, these volumes are likely to remain, for a long time, the most reliable standard text. For the specialist, however, they may soon be superseded by the relevant volumes of the new Complete Works of Voltaire, an edition which is now being prepared by an international team of scholars (M. Pomeau is prominent among them) and published under the aegis of Theodore Besterman and the Institut et Musee Voltaire of Geneva. As I write, only one volume of the historical writings has yet appeared: my own edition of La Philosophie de Vhistoire. How¬ ever, there is much to interest the student of Voltairian historio¬ graphy in the two volumes of Besterman’s new, and much augmen¬ ted, edition of the Notebooks, and some of the major histories are likely to be published in the next year or two. They will contain a fully critical text and an extensive commentary. Two major studies of Voltaire the historian have appeared since my own was published; they are both considerably longer than mine, and treat some questions much more fully. The first, Furio Diaz’s Voltaire storico (1958), is particularly illuminating in its 161848 PREFACE detailed discussion of Voltaire as an historian of modern times. Diaz demonstrates the link between his political thinking and his historical writing, showing the extent to which the latter is a function of the former. He is a very sympathetic commentator, and his case for regarding Voltaire as a historical thinker of the first magnitude with a flair for appreciating the dialectic of history i
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