Citizens of a New Enlightened Age

Posted on 24 July 2026 by gpilard

It was late October in 1792, and in the Swiss town of Porrentruy, a revolutionary group was meeting. Its president, a man named Guinens, addressed his fellow members with a grandiose statement: ‘Citizens, brothers and friends’.

The fact is that Guinens was not a citizen, and nor, most likely, were any of his brothers and friends (let alone his sisters, for whom he had not a word to spare). Technically speaking, they were all subjects of the local bishop, who through the vagaries of mediaeval patchwork sovereignty had come to rule the town. In most of the rest of Switzerland, a ‘citizen’ was not something a radical like Guinens would aspire to be: the term denoted a member of the patrician class, marked out by their special legal privileges, their right to stand for office, and their haughty attitude towards the non-citizen masses. But something had recently transpired that was due to shape the course not only of Guinens’s life, but of the following two centuries of world history.

‘Constitution française du 3 septembre 1791’, Archives nationales, Paris.

A little over a year before, France had promulgated a new constitution, under which everyone born to a French father on the country’s soil had become a citizen. And not in the Swiss sense – these citizens were not proud local potentates but equals before the law, marked out by their enjoyment of identical ‘natural’ rights and the entitlement to participate in political life, to make the laws that bound them (if only through representatives). Now that status was on the march across Europe. When Guinens made his speech, French troops – French citizen-soldiers – had already occupied Porrentruy. Within a few months, he would become a citizen just like them – first of the ‘Rauracian’ sister Republic, and later of France itself, as his hometown was absorbed into the victorious revolutionary state. And amidst all this geopolitical flux, what it meant to be a citizen was changing rapidly.

We have often been inclined to regard 1789 as the cradle of modern citizenship. And when we think about what it means for us to be citizens, we tend to settle on two ideas that the Revolution seems to have bequeathed us: the ability to choose our own leaders, and a set of rights guaranteed for us by the state. But look around. Seventy per cent of the world’s population lives in autocratic states without either a vote or any hope of having their rights honoured. Nonetheless, we still recognise them as citizens of their states. In the democratic world, too, both these facets of citizenship look ever weaker. We vote infrequently and with, it seems, ever decreasing satisfaction with the results, ever falling confidence that they represent our genuine civic and collective will. Rights to speech, protest, civil disobedience, have all been steadily diluted by paranoid states armed with anti-terror legislation – to the point where pensioners holding up signs outside Parliament can be arrested as terrorists.

In such conditions, does it still mean anything to call ourselves citizens? Are we witnessing the death of citizenship as we once knew and (if we were lucky) experienced it? Or was this outcome already contained within the logic of citizenship? That is the question my new book, Citizens of a New Enlightened Age, sets out to answer. I argue that the French Revolution, rather than bequeathing us a kind of modern, liberal citizenship, actually created something more like what we are coming to see today: a status whose political role varies from highly limited to non-existent, and whose associated rights are at best conditional and precarious. I call this ‘Napoleonic citizenship’, but it began to form long before le petit caporal crowned himself and Joséphine in Notre Dame.

‘Le Tems passé: le Tiers-etat, la noblesse, le clergé’, Jean-Baptiste Compagnie (Paris, 1790). BnF/Gallica.

Indeed, the dilution of the political aspect of citizenship can be traced back to the very start of the Revolution. As the Estates-General met in 1789 and the Third Estate waged war on the prerogatives of the clergy and nobility, the language of citizenship proved to be the deadliest weapon in its arsenal. But this was not the classical notion of the citizen as a political actor, like the citizens of ancient Athens or republican Rome. The vision they were conjuring up was that of the citizenry as a plane of moral and legal equals – one with which the special privileges of the First and Second Estates were incompatible. The constitutional order that the freshly-constituted National Assembly subsequently instated would divide the country into voting ‘active’ citizens and non-voting ‘passive’ citizens – including women, the very poor, and the under-24s. It also sought to restrict the part that even the active citizens would play in politics by banning them from deliberating on political manners when they met to vote.

The Assembly did not have it all its own way, however. Women found ways of asserting their right to political life, either by demanding the vote or by redefining the meaning of political participation to include the raising of republican children. Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just managed to vote in 1790 and 1791, despite being under the minimum age, because of an inattentive clerk – who presumably was haunted for the rest of his days with the thought of how many lives he might have saved had he nipped the young man’s burgeoning political interests in the bud.

All this culminated in the radical turn of mid-1792, when passive citizens voted illegally in defiance of the Assembly and the Jacobins swept to power, overturning the limited franchise and introducing near-universal manhood suffrage. But the anti-political bent of the Revolution persisted. The new government feared that the French people were citizens in name only: while they had been made formally free in law, they had not yet absorbed the self-denying mentality that was necessary for a true virtuous citizen. A ‘good’ citizen, in this understanding, must be orientated towards the well-being of the public as a whole, and away from their own private interests.

This obsession with the need to create ‘good citizens’ resulted in an absolute intolerance of political opposition, because anyone who contested a state that was steering towards the public good must be a bad citizen, putting their own sectional interest ahead of the nation. The culmination of this principle was the Terror, an effort to purge the bad citizens from French society. In the aftermath of this traumatic event, the new Thermidorian regime looked to create a new kind of citizen. The fear now was that the French people had in essence gone mad, driven to insanity by the twin experiences of royal and Robespierrean despotism.

To this, they had two answers. The first was to reform the national language. Radical clergyman Henri Grégoire took the lead here, introducing a sweeping programme to make everyone speak standard French. The principle was that the dialects or patois spoken by two-thirds of French people were not rational enough to convey modern, Enlightened ideas, and so their speakers were still mired in ancien régime servility and obscurantism. Paris-based revolutionaries were similarly unfavourable towards the non-French languages current in parts of the country – it was suggested indeed that the Corsicans had risen up against the revolutionary government because they still spoke Italian, a backward and thoroughly irrational language. If they were taught to speak standard French, they would be able to absorb and recommunicate revolutionary ideas, which would create a more stable social base for the revolutionary state.

‘Habit civil du Citoyen François’, Jacques-Louis David, Vivant Denon, 1793. BnF/Gallica.

The second answer was to dilute citizens’ opportunities to deliberate, since in their present condition, letting them come together and discuss politics would only lead to the kind of chaos the country had seen in 1792. Constitutionalists tinkered with proposals to have citizens vote individually and privately, rather than in the traditional ‘primary assemblies’ where a whole commune came together to cast their votes in public. One politician, François-Xavier Lanthenas, translator of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man into French, pleaded with his compatriots that if they did not feel they could vote solely in line with their individual judgement, and without being swayed by the rhetoric of their fellows, they should abstain from elections. (Not necessarily bad advice even today.)

The result of all this was an ideal of the citizen whose political role was drastically reduced. Rather than coming together to discuss with his (the citoyenne still did not get a look in at this stage) fellows and then vote according to their rational deliberations, the citizen was to be cajoled and disciplined into fulfilling his electoral duty as infrequently and with as minimal fuss as should be possible.

That is part one of my story. Part two traces another trend in the Revolution that reverberates today: the growing precariousness of rights.

The French citizen was definitionally also a soldier – in a country still under the sway of ancient Greece and Rome, it could not be otherwise. But a life of soldiering was an uneasy fit with the kind of citizenship France hoped to construct.After all, a soldier had no right to make the laws that bound him: he was under a military code set by someone else. He was under the arbitrary authority of another person, namely his commanding officer. And he did not have – to name just some of the new liberties of the citizen – freedom of movement or a free choice of his occupation, unless he wanted to be shot for desertion. One volunteer captured this contradiction in a cheeky verse:

‘Before, in the depths of slavery,
I at least had my liberty;
Free today through my courage,
I am in captivity!’

So declaring the citizen a soldier had an immediate impact on the guarantee underpinning his rights: it made clear that these could be suspended if the state found this to be in its interests.

A similar result emerged from wrangling over what it really meant to be French. Before the Revolution and in its early stages, it had been common to believe that to become French, one only had to will it – and a number of prominent foreign sympathisers with the Revolution were duly granted honorary French citizenship in 1792. One of these was granted to Friedrich Schiller, who in fact opposed the radical turn of the Revolution. He would not receive it, however, until 1798, because the French postal service, apparently not knowing how to reach him, had simply dispatched it in the general direction of his hometown of Weimar with the address ‘To Monsieur Gilles’, a somewhat rough approximation of the German writer’s name.¹

By the end of the decade, however, the French state was less and less willing to wait for people to want to be French. The annexation of various territories on its borders, most dramatically of Belgium in 1798, was a demonstration of its power to impose French citizenship on millions of people at a time with a stroke of a pen. This came to be expressed as the legal principle that the French state could make anyone a citizen whether or not they wanted to be French. One Irishman, Terence Macmahon, discovered this to his cost in 1803 when he went to court to get a divorce overturned, and found himself – presumably to his surprise and consternation – declared a French citizen against his will. Equally importantly, if the state could make Macmahon a citoyen malgré lui, it could also strip its people of their citizenship against their will.

Nowhere was this principle felt so starkly as in the French colonies, where, in 1793-94, the French state – bowing to the pressure exerted by a widespread revolt across Haiti, then named Saint-Domingue – formally bestowed citizenship on almost a million Black enslaved people. Then, a decade later, Napoleon used the power of his autocratic state to reimpose slavery on that same group of people. The citizens of Haiti, rejecting this prerogative, rose up once again and, under their newly-constituted republic, embarked on their own experiment with citizenship, which they would associate strictly with Blackness.

Back in the metropole, the imperial boomerang was delivering a short, sharp shock to the already battered and bruised French citizen. The name of this shock was the Code civil.

While this document is – partly through the efforts of one G. W. F. Hegel – widely thought of as an Enlightened and rational text, the Code civil had deeply authoritarian elements. Among these was a drastic expansion in the number of crimes to be punished with an ancient penalty known as mort civile – civil death. Once reserved for only the most serious political crimes, above all treason, civil death could now be imposed on those convicted of, among other faults, robbery, forgery of French currency, fraudulent bankruptcy, performing an unauthorised marriage, and ‘unprovoked castration’. (For those looking to castrate someone, it was thus worth finding a good pretext.) In practice, civil death meant the complete loss of all one’s rights, including – and this was a Napoleonic innovation – property rights. This change rendered the rights of citizenship entirely conditional on good behaviour and the will of the state. We are still feeling the effects of that today.

‘Napoléon I^er sur le trône impérial’, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1806. Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

Napoleon also continued the steady purging of political content from citizenship, but in this he had some surprising helpers: early liberals Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant. Both believed citizens must have some political voice, but they also denied that this was the essence of citizenship. The citizen, rather, was he or she who had complete and unconditional enjoyment of their rights. Political participation was desirable only insofar as it contributed to this end – and it could easily be jettisoned, as Constant proved when he collaborated with Napoleon to draft the Acte additionnel aux constitutions de l’Empire in 1815. In Hegel’s account, Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback, bringing rationality to Europe first at the point of a bayonet and then at the nib of a pen. By redrawing its borders and redrafting its laws, he is supposed to have ushered in modernity.

My suggestion is that this role was double-edged. The rights-based liberal citizenship that he exported from France was accompanied by its own shadow: a precarious and reactionary citizenship that converted rights back into privileges at the mercy of raison d’état.

Today, I suggest, the true heir of revolutionary France may be China, where ‘Napoleonic citizenship’ has reached its apogee: a nearly non-existent political role and conditional enjoyment of rights. And the rest of the world seems to be bending towards that pole. On the other hand, there may be an alternative path. Revolutionary upheavals like the Arab Spring prove there is still an appetite for a different, more participatory mode of citizenship. Perhaps the world can yet emerge from the shadow of the Code civil.

– Samuel Harrison
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783112249109/html

Schmidt, Alexander. ‘The Liberty of the Ancients? Friedrich Schiller and Aesthetic Republicanism’. History of Political Thought 30, no. 2 (2009): 286–314. ↩︎

Henry Lloyd ‘militaire-philosophe’, a little known archive

Posted on 3 July 2026 by gpilard

Fig.1. Henry Lloyd by Nathaniel Hone, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

The entry on General Henry Lloyd (c.1720-1783) in the Dictionary of National Biography has inaccuracies but gives a general account of this elusive man who took great care to remain concealed.

It is misleading to describe Lloyd as a ‘soldier’: his skills were in the reconnoitring/intelligence-gathering and geographical aspects of warfare. He employed his talents for the French, Austrian and Russian armies rather than the British and was therefore never wholly trusted in London.

From what Lloyd revealed to friends it appears that he was born around 1720 in the Wrexham area of Wales and was highly educated. ln his late teens or early twenties an unknown calamity caused him to leave Wales for good and sever all contact with his family. It may well be that the name Henry Lloyd was assumed at this time. Humphrey and Evans are at different times added to the mix.

In the early 1740s the young Lloyd was easy prey to the Jacobite cause. With Jacobite help he crossed into France and was later recruited in the capacity of cartographer to the new regiment of the Royal Ecossais with which he remained until after the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1747. He then travelled widely in search of military and diplomatic experience. On the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1757 he joined the Austrian army but characteristically later changed sides for better pay and promotion, joining the Imperial army under the command of the duke of Brunswick. Here he met not only his later patron, and future Commander in Chief of the British army, the marquess of Granby, but also Henry Clinton who became a close friend and may have introduced him to another friend Viscount Fitzwilliam.

Fig.2. Writings on the campaign of the year 1758.

In 1763 Lloyd returned to England, taking on various diplomatic commissions for Granby and his successors, notably in Italy in 1768 and in Russia in 1774. He also set about composing an account of the war but he only accomplished the first two years[1] before turning aside to write about the general principles of war, the characteristics of the different national armies of Europe and the impact of one on the other.[2] This was novel and shows Lloyd to be a leading military historian of the eighteenth century. In 1790 it was translated into French as the Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Lloyd. It was widely read in France and widely criticised by, among others, Napoleon and Baron Jomini,[3] partly in retaliation for Lloyd’s over-frank criticisms of the conduct of the French and Prussian armies during the campaign of 1758.

In the late 1770s, while owning a house in Huy near Liège, Lloyd divided his time between England and France, still employed on intelligence gathering for the British government. He was loudly critical of the policies followed by the British army during the War of American Independence, and after the entry of France into the war was equally critical of the neglect of Britain’s coastal defences. He seems to have run into trouble with a group of American supporters and spies in Brussels. During the peace negotiations of 1783 Lloyd died suddenly at Huy in unexplained circumstances. Shortly afterwards his house was entered by British agents and his working papers and maps removed on the pretence of debt collection.

Fortunately, various drafts of Lloyd’s literary writings escaped the seizure of his papers. They passed to his son and were given by his granddaughters to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1861. This depository was chosen because of Lloyd’s connection with the Founder, Viscount Fitzwilliam, and for that reason they are still held there. Their irrelevance to the Fitzwilliam’s own collections has stood in the way of funds being made available for cataloguing them, and until that has been done they cannot be made available for microfilming or scanning.

The papers at the Fitzwilliam can be broadly divided into two groups. The first is the fairly coherent sewn cahiers of papers, in two boxes on constitutional and philosophical matters. These relate to the late 1760s, when Lloyd was based in Milan primarily acting as an agent for the British government during the Corsican revolt. He had met Pietro Verri when both were serving in the Austrian army in 1759. The Lettere e scritti inediti di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri[4] contain numerous references to Lloyd who alternately intrigued and exasperated them while they were constantly struck by his abilities and his clarity of thought. Lloyd’s contributions to the intellectual circle around Beccaria and the Verri brothers are discussed in chapter 3 of Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: political economy and commercial society in Enlightenment Italy.[5] Verri reports in June 1768 that Lloyd was in the countryside intending to write a book comparing Helvétius with Montesquieu. Some of the Fitzwilliam cahiers are in French, some in English, one often a translation of the other. They may be working copies for Lloyd’s own use. I believe that someone familiar with the writings of Montesquieu and particularly Helvétius could assess this material relatively easily though there is a lot of it.

The third box contains a haystack of unsorted papers relating to Lloyd’s history of the Seven Years War and some random documents from his time in Russia. I have found that most of them belong to the ‘Continuation’ volume of 1781 (see illustrations 3 to 5, above). Some are final drafts, others are rougher notes. The lack of any order or numbering sequence means that it is difficult to make head or tail of them on a short visit.

These papers have been little studied since the work of Franco Venturi in the 1970s, and not at all in depth.[6] Few people know they are there. Should anyone be interested in taking any of this further I have more detailed notes which I would readily pass on.
Please email me at [email protected]

There is an overlap between the two groups of papers in that Lloyd carried into his overall philosophy of war his views on the motives and ‘passions’ of men, differences in national character and the influence on this of different forms of government and war making. He might have described himself as a militaire philosophe.

– Janet Godden

[1] History of the late war in Germany […] by a general officer who served several campaigns in the Austrian army. Part I (London, 1766).

[2] Continuation of the History of the late war in Germany Part II By Major-General Lloyd who served several campaigns in the Austrian army (London, 1781).

[3] Notes inédites de l’empereur Napoléon I^er sur les mémoires militaires du General Lloyd (Paris, 1901). Jomini’s writings on war passim, although Jomini also admired Lloyd’s work and was much influenced by him.

[4] Ed. C. Casati, 3 vol., Milan 1879-1882.

[5] Cambridge, Mass., 2018.

[6] Franco Venturi, Le Vite incrociate di Henry Lloyd et Pietro Verri (Turin 1977, and, ‘Le avvanture di Henry Lloyd’, Rivista storica italiana (1979). The papers have also been consulted by the American military historian Patrick J. Speelman, Henry Lloyd and the military enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe (Westport, CT, 2002, based on a doctoral thesis for Temple University).

Witnessing Enlightenment in Action

Posted on 7 May 2026 by gpilard

Lausanne *Grand Hôpital*. Photo Wikimedia Commons, 2011.

In January 1782 the Lausanne Literary Society (Société littéraire de Lausanne) convened a meeting to discuss its purpose and organisation. The institution had been reactivated almost two years earlier, following a first phase in the early 1770s, and attendance was starting to dwindle. Its members gathered at their informal headquarters – a bright, stove-heated, pine-panelled room on the second floor of the local Grand Hôpital – where, seated around a table, they exchanged views on the matter at hand.

Jacques-Barthélémy Vernède, a Huguenot merchant of Amsterdam fame who had recently relocated to Lausanne, observed in his opening remarks that the society had been founded as a ‘recréation utile et non une occupation sérieuse ’, and cautioned against narrowing the scope of its inquiries or injecting excessive erudition into its meetings. Local theologians David Levade and Antoine Bugnion, former pastors at the Walloon Church in Amsterdam and the Swiss Church in London respectively, agreed with him, citing academies as examples of tedious repetition. Others, however, begged to differ. Samuel Constant, a military officer-turned-novelist and an acquaintance of Voltaire’s based in the Genevan countryside, urged his colleagues at least ‘de s’efforcer de jetter un peu d’érudition dans les mémoires comme dans les discours ’, in order to make meetings more useful and meaningful. Two young locals, the physician François Verdeil and the firebrand lawyer Louis Secretan, expressed frustration at the lack of focus of most meetings. Antoine Servan, a former member of the Parlement of Dauphiné and a leading advocate of Beccaria-inspired penal reform in France, went further still, proposing a plan for the institution’s reorganisation. Meanwhile, John Gillies, a Scottish Hellenist and travelling tutor, observed the discussion quietly, breaking with his usual active participation. In the end, as was often the case, compromise prevailed: the Literary Society retained its rules and practices, but members devised a plan for the topics to be debated in the months ahead.

We have a clear picture of this meeting of the Lausanne Literary Society – as well as of dozens of others from its periods of activity in 1772-1773 and 1780-1783 – thanks to its extensive minute books. The society had been founded in March 1772 at the initiative of Georges Deyverdun, a local man of letters today best known as a close friend and collaborator of Edward Gibbon, and as the author of the French translation that helped make Goethe’s Werther a continental phenomenon. He was supported by Gabriel Mingard, a local theologian and a major contributor to the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon, and by Jean-Nicolas Pache, then a modest French tutor who would later rise to the pantheon of Revolutionary France as the first elected mayor of Paris in 1793. This cosmopolitan institution, which brought together members of the local elite and foreign residents in Lausanne, practiced a form of sociability common in eighteenth-century Europe, convening weekly to discuss pre-arranged questions. In accordance with the society’s rules, members were invited either to present essays or simply to offer their opinions on the ‘question du jour ’.

Anonymous portrait of Georges Deyverdun. Private collection. Photo Musée Historique de Lausanne.

Contrary to what its name might suggest to a contemporary audience, the Literary Society focused only marginally on belles-lettres, addressing instead a wide range of subjects – from moral philosophy to political economy – while explicitly excluding mathematics, physics, medicine and theology from its debates. Its secretaries were responsible for maintaining several sets of records: they documented the society’s rules and day-to-day operations (including attendance, expenses, contacts with authorities…) in a small in-octavo volume known as the Journal œconomique; copied members’ essays in a hefty in-folio volume aptly titled the Grand livre des mémoires (while preserving drafts awaiting transcription); and kept an updated list of questions for discussion in a small red volume, now unfortunately lost.

Among these records, the most significant is arguably the Journal littéraire, a thick in-folio volume that documents the actual debates taking place at the society’s weekly meetings, drawing on draft notes taken by its secretaries. Although the level of detail varies from entry to entry, each record at least summarises the views expressed by every participant. As such, the Journal littéraire captures not only the diversity of opinions within the society, but also the actual dynamics of meetings, beyond the formal prescriptions of its rules.

*Journal œconomique*, 1772-1782. BCUL, S 1387. Photo Naomi Wenger.

This kind of account, which offers a glimpse of the Enlightenment in action, is relatively rare. As Daniel Roche observed – with a pinch of frustration – in his magisterial Le siècle des Lumières en province (Mouton, 1978), the minutes of French academies reveal little about the substance of their discussions, favouring instead lists of attendance and administrative matters. Learned societies with practices and interests comparable to those of the Lausanne Literary Society have generally left behind similar kind of administrative records, as shown for instance in Lewis Ulman’s The Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (Aberdeen University Press, 1990) and Dorothy Owen’s The Minute-Books of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (Lincoln Record Society, 1981).

Some debates of the Lausanne Literary Society have been examined in La Société littéraire de Lausanne. Sociabilité et débats de réforme (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2025), yet much work remains to be done. The society’s records, largely preserved in the manuscript collections of the Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne, are now readily accessible through the critical edition Les registres de la Société littéraire de Lausanne, published by Slatkine and distributed by Honoré Champion. Introduced by an opening essay, the volume brings together the minute books discussed above, along with drafts of essays preserved by the secretaries or held in private archives of the society’s members. A comprehensive system of cross-references, together with a series of annexes – including a list of members and their biographies, lists of the questions debated and essays presented, and a detailed table of contents – facilitates navigation within this extensive corpus. In addition, a diplomatic transcription of part of these materials is available on the platform Lumières.Lausanne, which also provides a short introduction to the history of the Literary Society and its manuscript collection. The critical edition will be made available in Open Access from February 2027, thanks to the generous support of the Université de Lausanne, the Société Académique Vaudoise and the Swiss Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

– Damiano Bardelli

From OCV to OV: Announcing the publication of Digital Scholarly Editing in Practice: Making Oxford University Voltaire

Posted on 6 May 2026 by voltairefoundation

Scholarly editions have long been central to humanist study, and print editions continue to be produced according to well-established methodologies. In recent decades, digital scholarly editions have gained increasing prominence: some publishers have digitised existing print editions, a notable example being OUP’s Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO); other publishers have created born-digital resources. The shift from print to digital requires not only new editorial approaches but also sustained attention to questions of technical and financial sustainability – concerns that are especially relevant in the case of resources of reference.

In the case of the Complete Works of Voltaire (205 vols, 1968–2022), we began thinking about the future digital version several years before printing the final volume. The challenge was immense. We needed to preserve all the richness and complexity of the print editions, while ensuring that the information was clearly presented; at the same time, we wanted to transcend the limitations of the print edition, and exploit the digital medium to the full. The aim was to produce a fully digital edition, not a digitisation of the print edition.

In this essay, published as a Cambridge Element, we look at current trends in producing digital scholarly editions, and think about the particular challenges involved in modelling Voltaire. This author has a characteristic fondness for textual reuse – a quality of his writing that is challenging to editors of print volumes, but one that comes into its own in a digital edition. Voltaire cultivates a sort of Open Text that can perhaps only be truly understood in a digital edition… These and other questions are discussed in our new book:

Digital Scholarly Editing in Practice: Making Oxford University Voltaire

Cambridge University Press

Published online: 28 April 2026

Print publication: 31 May 2026

This Element may be downloaded free of charge from 29th April 2026 until 13th May 2026:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/digital-scholarly-editing-in-practice/033E79028A8F05B3537450D993A121C3

Dan Barker, Nicholas Cronk & Glenn Roe

Reconstruire l’atelier de Voltaire

Posted on 23 April 2026 by gpilard

Il m’arrive parfois d’oublier que Voltaire est mort. C’est le résultat de la fréquentation quasi-quotidienne, depuis une vingtaine d’années, de ses papiers, de ses brouillons, et de sa correspondance pétillante de vie. Parfois, pendant quelques secondes, l’envie me prend de lui poser une question concernant les événements de l’époque, la paternité d’un ouvrage, la destinée ou la finalité qu’il envisageait pour un texte. Puis la réalité s’impose et je reviens aux textes et aux manuscrits qui restent la seule source d’informations concernant l’histoire littéraire et la genèse des œuvres.

Septième titre de la collection lancée en 2022 sous la direction de Nathalie Ferrand, Dans l’atelier de Voltaire, paru le 22 avril 2026, est le fruit de ces nombreuses années de lectures et de recherches. Quand Nathalie Ferrand a soulevé avec moi la possibilité d’écrire ce livre, j’ai été assaillie par le doute : ne serait-il pas trop similaire à ma première monographie, Voltaire à l’ouvrage, dans laquelle je me penchais sur les marginalia de Voltaire lecteur? Mais en fin de compte l’idée de l’atelier m’a entraînée dans plusieurs directions qui n’avaient rien à voir avec les notes marginales, et le recoupement entre les deux livres est minime. La proposition m’a ouvert la porte de l’atelier de Voltaire.

L’archive de chaque auteur est différente, et au XVIII^e siècle la préservation systématique des brouillons et des papiers d’auteur n’était pas courante. Il y a des exceptions, notamment celle de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, dont une partie importante a été conservée par l’écrivain. Le cas de Voltaire est plus typique de l’époque. Une fois l’œuvre publiée, il semble avoir principalement gardé les documents qu’il estimait encore utiles pour de nouveaux projets, comme des cahiers de notes, ou bien des brouillons ou des mises au net d’ouvrages dont il n’était pas encore satisfait. Par exemple, le 17 septembre 1765 il écrit au comte et à la comtesse d’Argental, au sujet d’une tragédie composée en 1733 qui venait d’être reprise à la Comédie-Française le 8 septembre après plus de trente ans : « J’ai retrouvé ici dans mes paperasses, deux tragédies d’Adelaïde ; elles sont toutes deux fort différentes » (D12887). Mais d’autres documents ont également échappé à la corbeille, notamment des manuscrits et des volumes corrigés qu’il offrait à ses amis et à ses protecteurs, comme cet exemplaire d’un mélange d’œuvres publié en 1748 et corrigé par un secrétaire, Sébastien Longchamp.

Étant donné le caractère incomplet et assez aléatoire de l’archive, j’ai essayé d’exploiter un éventail de sources aussi vaste que possible pour comprendre l’atelier de Voltaire dans le sens le plus large du terme. Sa correspondance recèle de précieuses indications concernant la manière dont il travaillait, ses recherches, les témoignages de tiers : que ce soit Émilie Du Châtelet qui évoque (D1116) « une petite pièce que votre ami a fait [sic] dans sa chaise de poste » en juillet 1736 – il s’agit du poème Le Mondain – ou encore une lettre de 1764 ou 1765 (D12279) à Paul Claude Moultou, ministre protestant à Genève, à laquelle Voltaire joint un chapitre d’une œuvre en chantier (La Philosophie de l’histoire) en demandant des éclaircissements sur les anciens Chaldéens pour améliorer son texte. Très rares sont les notes laissées par Voltaire où il s’interroge sur la forme qu’il doit donner à ses textes, mais le brouillon d’une lettre au compositeur Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, qui devait faire la musique du livret d’opéra de Pandore, comporte en marge, à 90° du texte, des réflexions autographes de Voltaire qu’il semble s’adresser à lui-même: « peut on repeter deux fois je vous appelle en vain – on ne sest pas encor avisé de ces repétitions. il me semble quelles feraient un bon effet », etc. Cette répétition ne figure plus dans le texte de Pandore tel qu’on le connaît, aussi Voltaire a-t-il dû changer d’avis après novembre 1765, date de la lettre. S’ajoutent à cette énorme correspondance d’autres sources primaires, comme le catalogue de la bibliothèque de Ferney en 1776-1777, les marginalia (tout de même), et les traces d’emprunts de la Bibliothèque du roi dans les années 1730 et 1740.

Illustration 1: D12966, brouillon de lettre à Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, de la main de Wagnière avec note de Voltaire, Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, MS-FS-11-003, f.297v.

De nombreux secrétaires et copistes participent de manière importante à l’atelier. Il a déjà été question de Longchamp, qui exerce son métier pendant quatre ans (1746-1750). À son tour, le fidèle Jean-Louis Wagnière remplit cette fonction auprès de Voltaire pendant une vingtaine d’années jusqu’à la mort du maître, et sa main est omniprésente dans l’archive. Dans mon livre, j’ai l’occasion d’étudier la mise au net qu’il a produite des Mémoires de Voltaire ainsi que le manuscrit dit « La Vallière » de Candide, également de sa main, ces deux documents comportant des ajouts fascinants de la main de l’auteur (voir ci-dessous, illustration 2). Une lecture attentive de tous les indices permet de reconstruire dans une certaine mesure l’histoire de la création du manuscrit dans chaque cas : les étapes de la copie, les révisions de l’auteur, les éventuelles modifications matérielles. Par exemple, le manuscrit des Mémoires et celui de Candide ont tous les deux subi le prélèvement de feuillets auxquels d’autres ont été substitués, ainsi que le collage de papiers sous lesquels on peut retrouver une partie du texte primitif. On voit sur un feuillet du manuscrit des Mémoires (voir ci-dessous, l’illustration 3) des traces de brisures d’un pain à cacheter qui servaient à coller une paperolle (illustration 4) dont le texte remplaçait une leçon antérieure. En rapportant la querelle qui l’a opposé à Maupertuis en 1752 à l’Académie de Berlin, Voltaire module la réaction qu’il attribue dans un premier temps à « Toute l’Europe Litteraire », mais ajoute de l’indignation et du mépris pour humilier davantage son adversaire.

Illustration 2: page d’une réécriture du chapitre 22 de *Candide*, envoyée au duc de La Vallière. Manuscrit de la main de Wagnière avec des retouches de Voltaire. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3160, f.112 *quater*.

Les dossiers génétiques voltairiens les plus riches sont ceux qui concernent les œuvres historiques, et en tout premier lieu l’Essai sur les mœurs. Entre les notes de travail initiales qui ont survécu, une mise au net avec corrections autographes (encore une fois il s’agit de la main de Longchamp), un cahier comportant une deuxième séquence de notes postérieure à la mise au net, et un exemplaire imprimé copieusement corrigé donné à un ami lausannois, il est possible de retracer le parcours intellectuel de Voltaire et en même temps d’arriver à une meilleure compréhension de ces objets à la fois textuels et matériels que l’histoire nous a légués : en identifiant les écritures, en croisant les cahiers avec la correspondance, en soulevant les paperolles collées çà et là, en trouvant qu’une feuille volante dans une bibliothèque faisait autrefois partie d’un volume conservé dans un autre fonds, on retisse des liens oubliés depuis deux siècles.

Ce projet de recherche (de rêve) m’a conduit à fouiller dans bien des recoins obscurs de l’archive voltairienne, lacunaire et dispersée, et m’a permis de dénicher quelques trésors. Je suis redevable non seulement à Nathalie Ferrand de m’avoir proposé d’entreprendre l’exploration de l’atelier de Voltaire, mais à tous les conservateurs de bibliothèque, amis et collègues qui m’ont aidée en cours de route.

– Gillian Pink

Voltaire in the Baltic World

Posted on 16 April 2026 by gpilard

Last month the Voltaire Foundation partnered with the University of Tartu’s Museum of Art for a conference in Tartu, Estonia, dedicated to Voltaire and the influence of the French Enlightenment in the Baltic region. Scholars joined from Tallinn and Tartu and from further afield, Vilnius, Riga, France, and the UK to explore Voltaire’s influence through intellectual history, literary studies, philosophy, and history of art, spanning the 18th-20th centuries.

The papers reflected a wide range of approaches and topics including studies on sculptural representations of Voltaire in the public and private sphere, Baltic German reception through Georg Johann Eisen and Garlieb Merkel, known as the ‘Livonian Voltaire’, and library holdings, from the historic Königsberg Library, the Latvian National Library, and Tartu University Library (the founder, Karl Morgenstern’s collections). Other interesting contributions included an examination of a controversial Estonian translation of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique from the 1980s, which acted as a major trigger for a larger debate on the situation of translation studies in the country. From Vilnius came particularly engaging discussions of Voltaire’s reception during the Soviet occupation. Nicholas Cronk took the opportunity to highlight the four Voltaire manuscripts in Tartu library, and which included one unknown manuscript, so there was cause for a small celebration there!

Nijolė Maskaliūnienė and Ingrida Tatolytė from Vilnius University, presenting on Voltaire translations into Lithuanian.

What was clear from the conference is that the influence and reception of Voltaire in the Baltic region varies significantly across different local contexts and historical periods, which is not immediately apparent. While the Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland, and Kurland) are often grouped together due to their shared history as western borderlands annexed by Russia in the 18th century, this broad framing can obscure important local differences. The region presents a complex interplay of shared historical experience and distinct local developments. For example, 18th- and early 19th-century Russian sculptural representations of Voltaire carried different meanings in the ‘privileged’ Baltic German provinces. Later, during the Soviet occupation, although Moscow dictated official interpretations of Voltaire, these were adapted locally in varying ways. Interpretations differed not only between Estonia and Lithuania, but also across time, such as between the 1950s and 1980s.

Voltaire himself emerged as a quasi-sacred figure – albeit one understood in different ways. His name and celebrity circulated widely, sometimes detached from historical accuracy. This was evident in the case of a bust purchased by Karl Morgenstern from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts at the turn of the 19th century. We know that Morgenstern purchased a bust of Voltaire, however this bust on display which currently carries his name is certainly not Voltaire! There is clearly more to be explored in the construction and circulation of the ‘myth of Voltaire’ in the region.

Conference participants in front of the Jean Huber painting, *La Sainte Cène du patriarche*, currently on loan to University of Tartu Art Museum.

The conference took place in Estonia’s oldest art museum, located within the University’s main building, constructed in the early 19th century in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Participants were given a tour of the Voltaire exhibition, which currently features the Voltaire Foundation’s painting La Sainte Cène du patriarche by Jean Huber. We also visited the University’s main museum, housed in the old cathedral, and viewed Karl Morgenstern’s library, where we noticed a Kehl edition of Voltaire on display…

The conference programme is available here: https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/call-for-papers-voltaire-in-the-baltic-world-circulations-receptions-legacies/

Many thanks indeed to the director of the University’s museum, Mariann Raisma for hosting us and opening the conference, alongside Sophie Coumel, Director of the Institut français. We are very honoured to be showcasing some of the French Ambassador’s personal collection in the exhibition, currently on display.

Thank you to the University of Tartu researchers, Pärtel Piirimäe, Kadi Kähär-Peterson and Tanel Lepsoo, who helped to organise the event.

This is just the beginning of a larger project on French influences in the region, and the next stop is Riga, where we will return later in the year for a follow-up table ronde.

– Sophie Turner.
S. Turner is lecturer and visiting curator at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Kadriorg Art Museum, part of the Art Museum of Estonia dedicated to early European and Russian art. Her previous blogposts on Voltaire’s Baltic legacy can be consulted here:
– The Arts Collections.
– The Library Collections.

Oskars Roga, presenting on French rarities from the Latvian National Library.

The Republic of Letters under the microscope

Posted on 2 April 2026 by gpilard

Peter J. Koehler’s The Life of Philippe Fermin: Nature, Medicine and Law in Suriname and the Netherlands, recently published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, brings into focus a figure long neglected by historians of medicine and the Republic of Letters. The book reconstructs Fermin’s life and career across Europe and Suriname, from his surgical training in Berlin, Suffolk and Amsterdam to his involvement with slavery, scientific societies and the Republic of Letters.

In this blog post, Professor Laurence Brockliss, emeritus professor of Early Modern French history at the University of Oxford and historian of the Republic of Letters, explores how Koehler’s study reshapes our understanding of this scholarly network, and reflects on both the difficulties and the rewards of bringing overlooked figures back into focus.

The Life of Philippe Fermin. Nature, medicine and law in Suriname and the Netherlands is an intellectual biography of a Dutch naturalist, medical practitioner and judge-administrator who was born in Berlin in 1730, lived for a time in the Dutch colony of Suriname, then settled in Maastricht, where he died in 1813. Fermin’s books and articles on the history, flora and fauna of Suriname, written in French, were translated into English, German and Italian and appear to have had a wide circulation. He was also well known to members of the Berlin Academy, especially its secretary Samuel Formey. Today, though, Fermin is a forgotten figure whose name is never mentioned in the works of historians of science and medicine or historians of the Republic of Letters.

Herein lies the book’s fascination. Koehler’s biography is a significant contribution to our understanding of the reality of that virtual Republic. Much more than a community of stellar minds, the Republic of Letters comprised thousands of interconnected scholars and researchers, who believed that each in their small way was helping to build a world of enlightenment. Their existence was all but neglected by intellectual historians until the turn of this present century. Now, however, the lives of a cross-section about whom sufficient evidence survives are beginning to be reconstructed. Each biography which appears reveals how much these forgotten members of the Republic shared in common but also that they were very much individuals with their own trajectories determined by birth, income, inclination and chance. As Fermin’s biography confirms, every study throws up something new and unexpected.

We know there were several ways of belonging to the Republic. One way was to be content with provincial renown, be part of a correspondence circle, and publish next to nothing. Another way was to have a provincial base but use the ubiquity of the prize essay competition to gain an international reputation. Yet another was to decamp to a capital city in search of a salaried post in the branch of the sciences an individual was interested in. Fermin is a different kettle of fish. He may have wanted to become an internationally respected naturalist through his publications, but what he wanted primarily was to use them as currency to obtain administrative office. Patrons – royal and not-so royal – were targeted, and Formey, whose contacts were formidable, was asked to write letters of recommendation to them singing Fermin’s praises as a man of science worthy of promotion. Once done, Fermin would approach the individual directly sending a copy of his latest work and asking the patron’s help in getting the administrative post he coveted. Fermin was spectacularly unsuccessful most of the time but he aimed high: Catherine the Great was lobbied on one occasion. So, for Fermin membership of the Republic of Letters was not a passion: at different moments of his life, he did not think twice about selling his natural history collection or parting with most of his library. Membership was not even a hobby. For Fermin, it was the means to an end, which arguably reflected the fact that by background – he was the son of a wigmaker, not a professional or noble – he did not fit the membership profile.

Koelher is to be congratulated on adding another subject to the pantheon of the forgotten. The book, moreover, is a masterclass in how material can be pulled together to reconstruct such a life. The study is principally based on Fermin’s long-lasting correspondence with Samuel Formey, which survives in the Formey archive in Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek. But the author uses many other sources to flesh out his account. While unable to identify many other Fermin letters, he has uncovered nuggets of information about the naturalist-physician and his family from a wide variety of national and local libraries and archives, such as the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale (on Fermin’s masonic activities). The author has also made good use of the paratexts of Fermin’s published works to dig deeper into his web of literary and political connections. This is an impressive and very careful piece of historical detective work.

– Professor Laurence Brockliss

Professor Laurence Brockliss is an emeritus professor in Early Modern French history at the University of Oxford. His most recent publications on the Republic of Letters are: edited (with Ritchie Robertson), Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2016); edited and introduced, From Provincial Savant to Parisian Naturalist: the recollections of Pierre-Joseph Amoreux (1741-1824) (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2017); edited (with Floris Verhaart), The Latin Language and the Enlightenment (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2023).

Peter J. Koehler is a retired neurologist who focused on neuro-oncology and headaches. He obtained his PhD on a medical history topic (1989) and is co-editor of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences (1997). He published numerous articles and several books including Neurological Eponyms and The Stone of Madness: Art and History.

This post originally appeared on the Liverpool University Press blog.

Enlightenment Intimations of Mortality

Posted on 27 March 2026 by gpilard

Vladimir Borovikovsky, *Portrait of Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin*, 1811, National Pushkin Museum.

The first canonical genius of Russian poetry was Gavriila Derzhavin (1743-1816), who lived long enough to meet the young Alexander Pushkin and acknowledge his budding genius. Little translated into foreign languages, Derzhavin, who served in the government of Catherine the Great, was a philosophical poet whose lyric poems range across theological, metaphysical, and scientific questions. A Horatian by temperament, given to reflecting on Epicurean pleasures and Stoic calm, Derzhavin made his poetry a vehicle for myriad Enlightenment ideas about body and soul. We know little about his reading, however, and his sources have been hard to trace. Questions of mortality and posterity, and whether life is truly short and art long—as expressed in the aphorism ars longa, vita brevis—haunt his verse. Consider the elegy he wrote in 1779 ‘On the Death of Prince Meshchersky’. In pondering mortality and death, this most eloquent of poets finds himself at a loss for words—and uses the words he writes to describe that state of intellectual and emotional confusion. Even before the poem raises questions about the expressible and ineffable, the knowable and unimaginable, its opening line puts time and language in relation to one another:

Pendulum of time! Metallic din!
Your terrifying voice dumbfounds me;
It calls me, your anguish calls me,
Calls—and draws me closer to the grave.

No literal translation can capture the fact that the first word in Russian is glagol signifying ‘a pendulum’, a ‘tongue,’ a ‘verb’ and also ‘language.’ This connects the sound of the clock, a memento mori, the purpose of language, and symbolically the passing of time. For the eighty-eight lines, the clock will continue to tick but the imagination falters and takes the poet to the limits of his imagination and the trope of aposiopesis:

Son of luxury, cool alleys and delights,
Where, Meshchersky, are you hidden?
You have left the shore of this life,
You have gone away to the shores of the dead;
Here is your coil, but your spirit—no.
Where is it?—It is there.—Where is there?—We do not know.

Laurence Sterne, *The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman*, London: J. Dodsley, 1768, vol.1.

Readers of eighteenth-century literature might regard this as an analogy to Sterne’s visualization of death in Tristram Shandy in which a page is printed entirely black, bringing the reader face to face with the state of Poor Yorick. Readers of Joanna Stalnaker’s new book The Rest is Silence, fresh from the scintillating chapter on Diderot, might ask whether Derzhavin and Diderot discussed materialism during the latter’s visit to St Petersburg in 1774.

The Rest Is Silence,
Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, by Joanna Stalnaker, Yale University Press, 2025.

Students of Derzhavin and many another eighteenth-century writer will find much to enjoy and learn from in Stalnaker’s new book. Elegantly conceived, learnedly researched, and beautifully written, The Rest is Silence treats a set of French thinkers on the most universal of topics: death. Russians, though playing catch up philosophically for much of the eighteenth century, had also taken note of death as something to ponder. None of Stalnaker’s thinkers seek explanations in Christianity and traditional religion. All seem to have a capacity to entertain simultaneously uncertainty and what Bacon called ‘a wager of thought’, or what W. Jackson Bate called ‘a heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness’ in relation to the famous Keatsean idea of negative capability. And all her subjects from Hume to Roland—I shall skip over the chapter on Voltaire since Stalnaker herself has contributed a blogpost on his poetic Adieu—demonstrate the classic Enlightenment disposition to negotiate between the speculative conclusions of philosophizing and the empirical reality of experience. More detached from his own extinction by dint of his temperament and discipline is the great scientist Buffon. Threading the chapter from the deathbed scene through the analysis of chapters in his Histoire Naturelle de l’homme and crucially the more overlooked Histoire naturelle des minéraux, ‘Buffon’s Stone’ (Chapter 1) affiliates his view of death with his theory of ossification (itself the subject of an article in the Encyclopédie by Jaucourt), arguing that death represents a gradual transition rather than a marked change of state, a conclusion that Buffon believed would come to people who exercised their senses, and in the manner of Montaigne and other contemplative traditions, would accept the inevitable.

Buffon’s approach looks linear in contrast with the myriad ideas that come out of ‘Diderot’s Brain’ (Chapter 2). Central to the discussion is Diderot’s unfinished Élements de physiologie. Polymathic and collectivist by inspiration and sources, the Élements have been referred to as his second Encyclopedia and it is read alongside the underestimated late essay on Seneca. Among the most moving, and intricately expounded, pages are the discussions of the views this most vital of vitalist materialists held on posthumous fame and the possibility that the matter from which the self is constituted survives as traces in nature and new combinations; or in some fabulous notion of the ‘immense memory’, a wonderful conceit that is less intimidating than other holistic systems, whether Spinozist or Leibnizian.

This immersion or submersion of both the authorial and existential ‘I’ in larger bodies brings into relief Rousseau’s lifelong self-preoccupation, above all as displayed in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. This is a bridge to the final incomplete tenth reverie, which is read back through the lens of a pattern of contradiction in his thought that groups around the image of a periwinkle (the chapter is called ‘Rousseau’s Flower’). Something like Wordsworth’s spot of time, the flower is an emblem connecting two pieces of writing and two moments in time in writing the history of this singular sensibility. The chapter treats us at the end, having considered Rousseau’s late desperate attempts to rectify his family situation, to a reading of the tomb of Jean-Jacques in the Panthéon. The illustration itself speaks volumes as it depicts a hand holding a torch of truth extending from the grave.

François Bonnevile, *M.J.Ph. Roland née à Paris en 1756, femme du ministre de l’Intérieur assassinée par le tribunal révolutionnaire, le 19 bru.re l’an 2 de la Rép*., 1796, BnF.

This image of light extending from darkness was not shared by Madame Du Deffand (Chapter 5). Stalnaker rightly asks how Du Deffand, a non-believer, might have reacted to the final adieu she never read, since Voltaire’s sense of nothingness remained open-ended and speculative whereas her own concluded that the empirical fact of death was of total cessation of the senses, entailing a state of nothingness. Celebrated as a salonnière, studied and read as a magnificent letter-writer, Du Deffand stands out of the pack as the non-philosopher. Yet, as Stalnaker convincingly argues and shows, to be philosophical in a certain way can mean being a philosopher at least by the lights of Montaigne’s claim ‘That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die’, as the title goes. For Du Deffand there is no question that the answer to Derzhavin’s question above (‘Where is there’?) is unambiguously ‘nowhere’ or nothingness. The prospect that her letters would immortalize her did nothing to dislodge this belief. Did Du Deffand, having gone blind later in life, extrapolate into this nihilism the blackness of being sightless? Such pessimism about the value of writing to perpetuate a name was not shared by the subject of the book’s Epilogue, the French revolutionary heroine Madame Roland, the subject of the final chapter, whose final farewells reached heights of self-expressing when meting out feelings for loved ones and anxiety about the direction in which Robespierre’s Terror had taken her greatest political cause. At the end of the book, Madame Roland’s ‘Dernières Pensées,’ literally puts her neck on the line in defence of writing, countering the intimations of dissolution to be found in David Hume’s My Own Life in the book’s opening pages. It is interesting to note the wavering belief (or disbelief) in writing as a guarantee of posthumous fame just at a time when so many cultural conditions such as the growth of print culture, the new vocabulary of genius, and rise in literacy, might have instilled more confidence.

For all the book’s focus, it also takes flight in the delightful details which bring individual portraits to life. Do you want to know which fruit Diderot was eating when he expired? To whom did Madame Du Deffand bequeath her beloved dog, and why? Or what does the layout of Voltaire’s last poem graphically add to its message? There is a sleight of hand at work in The Rest Is Silence, since it maturely and bravely manages to consider the sombre and to enliven it at the same time. A measured and clear exponent of ideas, Stalnaker’s five thanatologies come out of a deep apprehension of the writings and profiles, intellectual and personal, of these remarkable subjects, and it strikes the right proportions for situating the place of death in the larger work and life, just as it manages to be a pleasure to read, to learn from, and even to hold as the book is well produced in the best Yale tradition.

– Andrew Kahn, University of Oxford

The Un-Naming of ‘Zamore’ and ‘Mirza’

Posted on 20 March 2026 by gpilard

A ‘name is an infinite source of control’ (George Lamming, ‘The Negro Writer and his World’, 1956). While personal to each human being, it also becomes a social designation of one’s identity. It is no surprise, then, that the routine practice of enslavers stripping enslaved people of their African or Indigenous names and renaming them with Christian, classical, or European names shapes much scholarship of the Atlantic slave trade (see, for example, Marylise Thill, Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge: The Ambiguity of a Slave’s Identity Through Naming, 2012). This removal and replacement of naming enforced ownership, allowing enslavers to control the identity of enslaved people. Yet this is not the only circumstance of forced un-naming and re-naming exercised throughout the early modern period. When we turn to imaginative literature, we see a pattern of racial blurring; exotic names become general indicators of the abstract colonised and orientalised Other – with consequences for real-life racialised people.

Alexander Kucharsky, Portrait of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793), c. 18th century (CC BY-SA).

Olympe de Gouges’ abolitionist play Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage (1785) is an exemplary example of how eighteenth-century texts relied on identity erasure to depict fictional enslaved characters. The original play, written in 1783/4, takes place on a colonial estate in the East Indies. The young Zamore and Mirza are noted initially as being South Asian domestic slaves who oversee Black enslaved field workers on a colonial estate. The play’s second version, written in 1788, shifts the drama to India and converts Zamore and Mirza into enslaved field workers of abstract racial identity (although they are implied to be South Asian). This process of racial blurring becomes further articulated in the play’s final version, written shortly before de Gouges’ death on the guillotine in 1792. Here, Zamore and Mirza are transformed once again into enslaved ‘n****s’. The play’s geographic ambiguity is often attributed by scholars to racial ignorance on the part of de Gouges. We argue that this homogenisation of racial identity is in fact a hallmark of French colonial imaginative literature; its lineage is found within much earlier iterations of ‘Zamore’ and ‘Mirza’.

We are first introduced to Zamore in Voltaire’s Alzire, ou les Américains (1736), and the name then reappears in Madeleine de Puisieux’s novel Zamor et Almanzine, ou L’inutilité de l’esprit et du bon sens in 1755. Either of these sources may have inspired de Gouges to appropriate the name. However, Zamor was also attached to real-life enslaved figures throughout the eighteenth century. Madame du Barry’s slave boy, likely a Siddi (an Indian of African descent), was renamed Louis-Benoît, though Zamor became his sobriquet. She remarks in her Mémoires that this renaming was in part ‘En l’honneur de la tragédie d’Alzire’ (Jeanne du Barry, Chroniques Populaires: Mémoires de Madame du Barri, sur la ville, la cour et les salons de Paris sous Louis XV, n.d.). Meanwhile, at least twelve people were given the name Zamor(e) in the Port-au-Prince newspaper Affiches américaines from 1785 to 1789 to denote individuals who escaped plantations and settled in marronnages. These instances of the name reveal a process whereby Zamor(e) became a racial stock name for enslaved boys/men. In short, by the time de Gouges employed the name, Zamor had come to denote an exotic Otherness, rather than a specific identity.

Zamor(e)

*Usage of Name*	*Text*	*Racial or Ethnic Identity*
Voltaire	Alzire, ou les Américains (1736)	Inca prince
Madeleine de Puisieux	Zamor et Almanzine, ou L’inutilité de l’esprit et du bon sens (1755)	Favourite emir of the sultan of Safavid Persia
Madame du Barry	Louis-Benoît Zamor	Likely Siddi
Affiches américaines	The name Zamor(e) appears in the newspaper between 1785–1789 a minimum of 12 times to label various maroons	Enslaved men of African origin
Olympe de Gouges	Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage (1785)	South Asian
Olympe de Gouges	Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage (1788)	Indian
Olympe de Gouges	Zamore et Mirza, ou L’Esclavage des Noirs (1792)	Enslaved African in the West Indies

*Revised and expanded from Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade, 2008.

Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, *Madame du Barry et le page Zamore*, end of 18th century, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian.

Mirza too underwent a process of racial blurring during the early modern period. Unlike Zamor(e), however, it was originally a real name, a male Persian one linked to nobility. It appeared throughout various histories of the Middle East in the seventeenth century, attributed to real-life figures, and by the eighteenth century it entered the realm of imaginative literature. Both Joseph Addison and Montesquieu employ the name in their Persian and Indian fantasies (Joseph Addison, The Vision of Mirza, 1711; Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, 1721). The shift in gender likely begins with Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), where the similarly-styled character Mirzoza is the mistress of the Kongolese sultan Mangogul. In Louis Guillaume de La Folie’s Le philosophe sans prétention, ou L’homme rare, ouvrage physique, chymique, politique et moral (1775), we see Mirza now firmly attached to a woman. She is probably still intended to be Persian at this point, as it is not until Gardel and Gossec’s Mirza et Lindor (1779) and its ill-fated sequel La feste de Mirsa (1781) that she crosses the Atlantic to become Creole. Mirza then becomes closely associated with prominent French writers, employed to denote both Middle Eastern, African, and racially ambiguous characters, as in de Gouges’ play. Madame de Genlis, for example, included a character entitled Mirza in Le Palais de la Vérité (1784). Germaine de Staël’s Mirza ou Lettre d’un Voyageur (1795) is another notable example where Mirza appears, now as an enslaved woman akin to de Gouges’ L’Esclavage des Noirs.

Mirza

*Usage of Name*	*Text*	*Racial or Ethnic Identity*	*Gender*
Common real name		Persian	Male
Joseph Addison	The Vision of Mirza (1711)	Allegorical tale supposedly found in Cairo	Male
Montesquieu	Lettres persanes (1721)		Male
Diderot	Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748)	Mirzoza is the mistress of the Kongolese sultan Mangogul	Female
Louis Guillaume de La Folie	Le philosophe sans prétention, ou L’homme rare, ouvrage physique, chymique, politique et moral (1775)	Enslaved (likely) Persian woman	Female
Maximilien Gardel and François-Joseph Gossec	Mirza et Lindor (1779); sequel La feste de Mirsa (1781)	Creole	Female
Madame de Genlis	Le Palais de la Vérité (1784)	Middle Eastern	Female
Olympe de Gouges	Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage (1785)	South Asian	Female
Germaine de Staël	Mirza ou Lettre d’un Voyageur (written 1786, published 1795)	Enslaved of African origin	Female
Olympe de Gouges	Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage (1788)	Indian	Female
Olympe de Gouges	Zamore et Mirza, ou L’Esclavage des Noirs (1792)	Enslaved African in the West Indies	Female

By the time de Gouges employed Zamore and Mirza in her play, then, these two names already constituted a generalised abstract colonial Other. Both Zamore and Mirza shifted from specific racial identities fixed to precise geographies and, over the course of the eighteenth century, they came to denote any colonised persons. All specificities of identity were therefore removed from these common character names resulting in a process of racial erasure not dissimilar to the renaming of enslaved people. Indeed, the fact that ‘Zamor’ became such a popular name to impose on enslaved people in the Antilles demonstrates the real-world consequences of French writers’ appropriation of these monikers.

– Caroline Gleason-Mercier and Samuel Harrison

Taking Newton on Tour

Posted on 13 March 2026 by gpilard

Jonathan Richardson the Elder, *Martin Folkes*, 1718, oil on canvas, Burlington House, Society of Antiquaries. Courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries.

In 2021 I wrote about a putative portrait of Voltaire by Hogarth for the Voltaire Foundation. Hogarth sketched a gentleman resembling Voltaire in a London coffeehouse with Martin Folkes (1690–1754), the antiquary, astronomer, and only simultaneous president of the Royal Society and Society of Antiquaries. Sociable and well-connected, Folkes belonged to the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society and the Académie royale des sciences; he counted Montesquieu and Voltaire among his friends, the latter calling him their ‘brother.’

Folkes excelled at building an international network to advance Newtonianism globally. In the 1730s he undertook a Grand Tour to Venice and Rome—not as a young gentleman, but as a married man traveling with his wife Lucretia (a former Drury Lane actress), three children, a parrot, a monkey, and a pug. His travel diary, now in the Bodleian Library, records the family’s route from Venice through Ferrara, Ravenna, and Loreto. It includes domestic moments—buying purple grapes for the children or rising early to show his son Ancona’s sights—as well as complaints about beggars and oppressive heat (both Folkes and Lucretia suffered prickly heat, or ‘scotture,’ in Venice).

William Hogarth, *The Painter and his Pug*, 1745. Self-portrait with his pug, Trump. Oil on canvas. Tate Britain, London.

A memorable episode involved losing the pug near Narni. Folkes fretted deeply, sent servants back with a large reward, but the dog eventually returned ‘almost starvd,’ still moaning as if recounting its ordeal. These anecdotes humanize Folkes, but the diary’s greater value lies in its scientific content.

In Venice, Folkes demonstrated optical experiments from Newton’s Opticks (Book I) before an invited audience at the Palazzo Giustinian, home of senator Giacomo Ascanio Giustiniani, a cultured patron of intellectual salons. Folkes aimed to recruit supporters for the Royal Society’s Newtonian agenda. While Newtonian optics were known in Venetian circles, doubts persisted about differential refrangibility across the spectrum—echoing earlier disputes, including the calculus priority controversy between Newtonians and Leibnizians (promoted in Padua and Venice by Jakob Hermann and Nicolas Bernoulli after 1710).

Folkes leveraged connections like Abbé Antonio Schinella Conti (1667–1749), whom he had met in London (1715–1718) and praised as the region’s most learned Italian. Conti had mediated between Newton and Leibniz during the calculus quarrel.

Diagram purporting to show the *experimentum crucis*, ca 1722, sent by Isaac Newton to Pierre Varignon, New College MS 351/2, fol. 45v, Oxford (new.ox.ac.uk).

Folkes also showcased the superiority of English prisms and instruments. As Simon Schaffer has shown, prism quality was critical for replicating Newton’s experimentum crucis—that white light was composed of coloured light rather that different-coloured light resulted from differing speed through a medium. Francesco Algarotti’s 1726 Bologna attempts failed due to poor prisms; success came only with high-quality English ones. Such standardization of apparatus marked an emerging consensus in natural philosophy and supported the Royal Society’s experimental programme.

The diary recounts other of Folkes’s encounters such as with Anders Celsius (1701–1744), later renowned for the temperature scale bearing his name. Folkes subsequently assisted Celsius in securing precision scientific instruments from horologist George Graham for his expedition to Lapland with Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759). That journey employed triangulation to determine the shape of the earth and to confirm Newton’s claim that the globe was flattened at the poles.

Folkes’s drawing measuring the Rialto in Venice, f. 19v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Influenced by Venetian Palladian culture and Giovanni Poleni’s Vitruvian studies, Folkes measured buildings to compare measurement standards. In Venice, he calculated the Campanile’s height from its shadow (converting palms to English feet) and gauged the Rialto Bridge with packthread and plumb bob. Discrepancies with Francesco Sansovino’s figures led him to attribute differences to varying units and construction. His measurements of San Geminiano confirmed Jacopo Sansovino’s use of Roman/Vitruvian proportions rather than Venetian ones. These activities reflect Folkes’s lifelong interest in metrology; after returning and becoming Royal Society president, he facilitated comparisons between Paris and London units via French and English measures.

Folkes’s diary challenges the view—fuelled by comparisons to Newton’s Principia, contemporary criticism, and later works like Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830)—that the eighteenth-century Royal Society declined. Instead, it remained dynamic in precision instrumentation and international exchange. Folkes’s journal exemplifies the ‘confabulatory life’ of Georgian science, where knowledge spread through travel, conversation, and informal networks, vividly illustrating Newtonianism in practice.

For more, see my critical edition of Folkes’s diary (the original in the Bodleian Library): Taking Newton On Tour: The Grand Tour Travel Diary of Martin Folkes (1690–1754), published by The Hakluyt Society and Boydell & Brewer.

– Anna Marie Roos, University of Lincoln; Clare Hall, Cambridge