Garry Apgar, "Une célébration bien discrète"

Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793

If the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), according to Thomas M. Luckett, "precipitated a process by which the theater became more sensitive to popular demand," then one dramatist channeled the public's tastes better than any other: Voltaire. 1 He was so popular during the 1760s that, as Lauren R. Clay shows, Voltaire was responsible for nearly "one-third of daily ticket sale income" at the Comédie-Française during the seasons of 1760-61, 1761-62, and 1766-67. 2 What Pierre Frantz calls a "Moment Voltaire" was triggered by the philosophe's engagement with contemporary theatrical tastes for the drame (Le Café ou l'Écossaise, 1760) and his staging of French patriotism during wartime (Tancrède, 1760). 3 But also, as Frantz shows, the period was a veritable showcase of Voltaire's career, complete with popular revivals of his early masterpieces from the 1720s and 1730s. The 1760s, which saw Voltaire "at the peak of his popularity" (Clay), saw nothing less than the "canonization" (Frantz) of Voltaire as both a philosophe and homme de théâtre. For a while, it seems that Voltaire could do no wrong at France's most prestigious stage. He was at the height of an impressive arc during which he surpassed any other dramatic author of the eighteenth century in ticket sales, total performances, and revenue-per-performance. Voltaire, as Luckett points out, virtually saved the Comédie-Française from financial ruin with his lucrative tragedies and comedies and his keen ability to tap into current events and polemics. Despite such glaring proof of Voltaire's standing, many historians and literary scholars of the period still refuse to consider the sheer magnitude of Voltaire's moment, even downplaying, in many cases, "the full scope of Voltaire's popularity" (Clay). The three authors in this section each rectify in their own way this critical oversight. With different approaches, they converge on Voltaire's triumphs and ground their conclusions with tight analysis of quantitative data from the new online Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP). In what follows, I tease out the most crucial points in essays by Luckett, Frantz, and Clay in an attempt to weave together their diverse accounts of Voltaire's rise to fame, his diverse theatrical output, and then, the philosophe's crash in popularity after the French Revolution. In "Financial Difficulties and Business Strategies at the Comédie-Française during the Seven Years War," Luckett describes the theater's losses and gains in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Luckett, an economic historian of early modern and revolutionary France, proves that the theater's finances were linked to the effect of war and peace on the pocketbooks of Parisian patrons. He also shows that the Comédie-Française's

French Studies

Me voilà en in-folio rongé des rats et des vers comme un Père de l'Église.-Voltaire 1 Constructing a monument In 1770 Voltaire's friends commissioned a statue in his honour, an unprecedented mark of recognition for a living writer. They could not have foreseen that the resulting work, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle's Voltaire nu (1776), now in the Louvre, would cause hilarity and embarrassment in equal measure: then, as now, monuments to great men could prove to be problematic. When D'Alembert had invited Frederick II to subscribe to the statue, the King of Prussia accepted, of course, replying magnificently that it was Voltaire's writings that were his greatest monument: 'Le plus beau monument de Voltaire est celui qu'il s'est érigé lui-même, ses ouvrages, qui subsisteront plus longtemps que la basilique de Saint-Pierre, que le Louvre et tous ces bâtiments que la vanité humaine consacre à l'éternité' (28 July 1770, D16552). The king's letter was read aloud at the Académie française, whose members asked for it to be preserved in their archives. Voltaire, ever alert to good publicity, went one step further by ensuring that Frederick's letter was included in an edition of his own works, 2 so becoming part of that very monument the king had celebrated. During Voltaire's lifetime, there appeared many collected editions of his works, the most prestigious of these published by the Cramers in Geneva from 1756, though other editions appeared, often without the author's active participation or with only his tacit approval. But none of these editions resembled the 'complete editions' as we know them today. 3 Voltaire's primary concern was to multiply the number of editions in circulation, not in order to make money but to flood the

2007

the parlements of france 11 'sauf accident, il sera bon gentilhomme et robin consciencieux' 19 Early reactions to the Magistrates 25 Voltaire and the Magistrates as Censors 37

Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793, 2020

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Voltaire was above all else an epic poet. La Henriade, the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, Zaïre, Mérope, Mahomet, L'Enfant prodigue, Nanine: such works brought Voltaire a well-deserved glory, both in Europe and in the Americas. Voltaire hoped to ultimately become immortalized through poetry, tragedy, epic, and comedy, the major genres of his time. When Voltaire was crowned on the occasion of the sixth performance of his last tragedy, Irène, on March 30, 1778 at the Théâtre-Français, the enormous ovation that he received was undoubtedly due to his role as philosopher, as France's first intellectual-but even more than that, to his status as a dramatic poet. There is no need, here, to review the role of dramatic writing, above all, tragedy, in the work of men of letters in the eighteenth century; in this regard, we can refer the reader to Gregory Brown's study of Beaumarchais. 1 René Pomeau has observed that it was precisely with the publication of OEdipe that Voltaire made his name, and that Arouet became "Monsieur de Voltaire." 2 Indeed, the philosopher never stopped writing for the stage: this is why Voltaire's theatrical works open the "deluxe edition" of his complete works. At a moment in which Voltaire's reputation as an epic poet was already in decline, Louis Moland, in his edition of Voltaire's complete works (which appeared between 1877 and 1883), justified his decision to open with the dramatic works due to their essential role in the writer's corpus: the intention in doing so, Moland wrote, was to represent Voltaire to the reader "just as he had been seen in the eyes of his contemporaries." 3 Indeed, alongside Racine and Corneille, Voltaire occupied the top tier of playwrights in France and beyond for well over a century. It is therefore just as necessary to interrogate the formation of Voltaire's immense fame as it is to interrogate the disappearance of that same fame in the nineteenth century. There are numerous ways to explain Voltaire's evolution. I will limit myself here to just a few reflections on what we might call the "Voltaire Moment," which is to say, not to the writing and production of Voltaire's works over time, but to the consolidation and appearance of those many works as an OEuvre-that is, as a collection of works perceived to bear the stamp of the writer's genius, and destined to become classics, as the registers of the Comédie-Française indicate.

H-France, 2012

2014

At the beginning of chapter XIX of Voltaire's "conte philosophique," we find Candide and Cacambo, his faithful companion and sounding board, en route from El Dorado and laden with some of its untold wealth, which they see as the unshakable foundation of their imminent happiness: "Nous sommes" says Cacambo, "au bout de nos peines et au commencement de notre félicité" [We are at the end of our travails and at the beginning of our happiness]. This last word has a cruelly ironic resonance, as we are immediately confronted by the exhibition of human ignominy, or "infamy" in Voltaire's terms, that is recounted in the next two paragraphs: En approchant de la ville, ils rencontrèrent un nègre étendu par terre, n'ayant plus que la moitié de son habit, c'est-à-dire d'un caleçon de toile bleue; il manquait à ce pauvre homme la jambe gauche et la main droite. "Eh, mon Dieu, lui dit Candide en hollandais, que fais-tu là, mon ami, dans l'état horrible où je te vois? J'attends mon maître, M. Vanderdendur, le fameux négociant, répondit le nègre. C'est ce M. Vanderdendur, dit Candide, qui t'a traité ainsi? Oui, monsieur, dit le nègre, c'est l'usage. On nous donne un caleçon de toile pour tout vêtement deux fois l'année. Quand nous travaillons aux sucreries, et que la meule nous attrape le doigt, on nous coupe la main; quand nous voulons nous enfuir, on nous coupe la jambe: je me suis trouvé dans les deux cas. C'est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe. Cependant, lorsque ma mère me vendit dix écus patagons sur la côte de Guinée, elle me disait: "mon cher enfant, bénis nos fétiches, adore-les toujours, il te feront vivre heureux, tu as l'honneur d'être esclave de nos seigneurs les blancs, et tu fais par là la fortune de ton père et de ta mère." Hélas! je ne sais pas si j'ai fait leur fortune, mais ils n'ont pas fait la mienne. Les chiens, les singes et les perroquets sont mille fois moins malheureux que nous. Les fétiches hollandais qui m'ont converti me disent tous les dimanches que nous sommes tous enfants d'Adam, blancs et noirs. Or vous m'avouerez qu'on ne peut pas en user avec ses parents d'une manière plus horrible.

Term paper for Historiography class, dealing with the production, reception and heritage of Voltaire's celebrated "Histoire de Charles XII" (June 2013).

2014

At the beginning of chapter XIX of Voltaire's "conte philosophique," we find Candide and Cacambo, his faithful companion and sounding board, en route from El Dorado and laden with some of its untold wealth, which they see as the unshakable foundation of their imminent happiness: "Nous sommes" says Cacambo, "au bout de nos peines et au commencement de notre félicité" [We are at the end of our travails and at the beginning of our happiness]. This last word has a cruelly ironic resonance, as we are immediately confronted by the exhibition of human ignominy, or "infamy" in Voltaire's terms, that is recounted in the next two paragraphs: En approchant de la ville, ils rencontrèrent un nègre étendu par terre, n'ayant plus que la moitié de son habit, c'est-à-dire d'un caleçon de toile bleue; il manquait à ce pauvre homme la jambe gauche et la main droite. "Eh, mon Dieu, lui dit Candide en hollandais, que fais-tu là, mon ami, dans l'état horrible où je te vois? J'attends mon maître, M. Vanderdendur, le fameux négociant, répondit le nègre. C'est ce M. Vanderdendur, dit Candide, qui t'a traité ainsi? Oui, monsieur, dit le nègre, c'est l'usage. On nous donne un caleçon de toile pour tout vêtement deux fois l'année. Quand nous travaillons aux sucreries, et que la meule nous attrape le doigt, on nous coupe la main; quand nous voulons nous enfuir, on nous coupe la jambe: je me suis trouvé dans les deux cas. C'est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe. Cependant, lorsque ma mère me vendit dix écus patagons sur la côte de Guinée, elle me disait: "mon cher enfant, bénis nos fétiches, adore-les toujours, il te feront vivre heureux, tu as l'honneur d'être esclave de nos seigneurs les blancs, et tu fais par là la fortune de ton père et de ta mère." Hélas! je ne sais pas si j'ai fait leur fortune, mais ils n'ont pas fait la mienne. Les chiens, les singes et les perroquets sont mille fois moins malheureux que nous. Les fétiches hollandais qui m'ont converti me disent tous les dimanches que nous sommes tous enfants d'Adam, blancs et noirs. Or vous m'avouerez qu'on ne peut pas en user avec ses parents d'une manière plus horrible.