¹ Voltaire, “Histoire,” in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds., ed., ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (University of Chicago, 2017), at http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu, my translation. Original text: “HISTOIRE, s. f. c'est le récit des faits donnés pour vrais; au contraire de la fable, qui est le récit des faits donnés pour faux.”

² See Momigliano, Arnaldo, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13/3–4 (1950), 285–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 286; Barret-Kriegel, Blandine, La défaite de l’érudition (Paris, 1988), 291–5Google Scholar; Grafton, Anthony, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), 189Google Scholar.

³ As Anton Matytsin argued in a recent work, the advent of modern antiquarianism and historiography was itself a response to the rise of skeptical attitudes towards historical knowledge as a whole. It was the charge against the idea of “historical certainty” (leveled first by Descartes and then by Malebranche and Pierre Bayle, in the seventeenth century) that led historians and antiquarians to largely redefine the methodological basis of their respective disciplines. See Matytsin, Anton M., The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, 2016), 235Google Scholar.

⁴ See Russo, Elena, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2007), 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ On the critique of “ancient fables” by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians see Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, 240.

⁶ See Hicks, Philip Stephen, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (New York, 1996), 210–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Suzanne Gearhart, for one, maintained that in Voltaire's work “the fabulous” presented itself as a mode of perceiving the world entirely opposite to the very concept of “the rational,” which would be both “the condition of historical knowledge” and “the principle of continuity uniting, through its progress, the origin and the end of history.” Gearhart, Suzanne, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1984), 32–5Google Scholar.

⁸ For somewhat dated examples of this particular critique see Collingwood, R. G. and Knox, T. M., The Idea of History (Oxford, 1962), 76–7Google Scholar; and Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951), 221–2Google Scholar.

⁹ White's preferred example here is not Voltaire (whose enthusiasm, in White's own explanatory model, prevented him from reaching this crisis until somewhat late in his career), but David Hume. See White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 54–5Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, 235.

¹¹ Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction, 35. Before Gearhart, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a lecture from 1963, had already underlined Voltaire's alleged fixation on vraisemblance at the expense of textual evidence: “Mere literary evidence, though contemporary, is devalued if it lacks what Voltaire called vraisemblance, that is, as Hume and Gibbon applied the concept, if it is incompatible not only with bon sens, but with the necessary consequences of economic and social facts.” Trevor-Roper, Hugh, History and the Enlightenment (New Haven, 2010), 8Google Scholar.

¹² Síofra Pierse, “Voltaire: Polemical Possibilities of History,” in Sophie Bourgault and Robert Sparling, eds., A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography (Leiden and Boston, 2013), 152–87, at 157.

¹³ “What is repugnant to the ordinary course of nature must not be believed, unless it is related by men inspired by the divine spirit. That is why, in the article CERTITUDE of this Dictionary, it is a great paradox to say that one should believe all of Paris when it affirms that it has seen a man rise from the dead, just as one believes all of Paris when it says that the battle of Fontenoy was won. It seems obvious that the testimony of all of Paris on an improbable thing cannot be equal to the testimony of all of Paris on a probable thing. These are the first notions of a sound metaphysics. This Dictionary is devoted to truth; one article must correct the other, and if there is any error here, it must be pointed out by a more enlightened man.” Voltaire, “Histoire,” my translation. Original text: “Ce qui répugne au cours ordinaire de la nature ne doit point être cru, à moins qu'il ne soit attesté par des hommes animés de l'esprit divin. Voilà pourquoi à l'article Certitude de ce Dictionnaire, c'est un grand paradoxe de dire qu'on devroit croire aussi bien tout Paris qui affirmeroit avoir vû résusciter un mort, qu'on croit tout Paris quand il dit qu'on a gagné la bataille de Fontenoy. Il paroît évident que le témoignage de tout Paris sur une chose improbable, ne sauroit être égal au témoignage de tout Paris sur une chose probable. Ce sont là les premieres notions de la saine Métaphysique. Ce Dictionnaire est consacré à la vérité; un article doit corriger l'autre; & s'il se trouve ici quelque erreur, elle doit être relevée par un homme plus éclairé.”

¹⁴ See Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, 258.

¹⁵ See Voltaire, “Le pyrrhonisme de l'histoire” (1768), in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, vol. 27 (Paris, 1879), 235–7.

¹⁶ See Marc Crépon, “La double philosophie de l'histoire de Voltaire,” in Bertrand Binoche and Franck Tinland, eds., Sens du devenir et pensée de l'histoire au temps des lumières (Seyssel, 2000), 76–84, at 79.

¹⁷ On that note, Pierre Force has made a compelling case that the philosophe's concerns with historical truth, far from ontological (that is, founded on a coherent idea of a “historical reality”), were in fact rhetorical. In other words, Force demonstrates that the distinction between “history” and “fable,” to Voltaire, was not a distinction between different things, but primarily a distinction between things said, between “ways of speaking,” and between two equally legitimate styles of representing past phenomena. See Force, Pierre, Croire ou ne pas croire Voltaire et le pyrrhonisme de l'histoire (Paris, 2014), 57–70Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Goverment (New York, 2000), 72–3.

¹⁹ To Pocock, “Gibbon knew what it was to see a beautiful hypothesis killed by a fact,” but Voltaire, presumably, did not. See ibid., 157.

²⁰ As Pierre Force suggests in his own analysis of this debate: “In Pocock's treatment of Voltaire, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between Gibbon's judgment and Pocock's own judgment.” Force, Pierre, “The ‘Exasperating Predecessor’: Pocock on Gibbon and Voltaire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77/1 (2016), 129–45, at 131CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²¹ Here, too, Trevor-Roper had, before Pocock, reached a similar conclusion about the relationship between Voltaire and Gibbon. See Trevor-Roper, “The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment,” 9–10.

²² The presence of Christian missionaries in China remains, to this day, the most famous example of this tension between Gibbon and Voltaire. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, 113–19.

²³ See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, 158–9.

²⁴ See Barret-Kriegel, La Défaite de l’érudition, 291–5.

²⁵ See ibid., 295.

²⁶ In his own preface to the Essai sur les moeurs, John Robertson tries to mitigate this critique, but his efforts backfire somewhat in recognizing that the project's philosophical reach walked hand-in-hand with its lack of rigor: “Voltaire may have displayed some of the vices of a ‘philosophic historian’ in his lack of exactness, but he also exemplified the virtues in the vast range of his curiosity and the astonishing breadth of his intellectual vision.” John Robertson, “Preface,” in Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (Oxford, 2009), xxxvii–xliii, esp. xliii.

²⁷ And indeed, in a thoroughly Gibbon-like move, Barret-Kriegel, La défaite de l’érudition, 295, accuses Voltaire of misjudging the veracity of the battle of Fréteval by refusing to take his sources seriously.

²⁸ Before Crépon, Barret-Kriegel herself had already sketched out this portrait of Voltaire paving the way to Kant's idea of Enlightenment. See ibid., 291.

²⁹ Crépon, “La double philosophie de l'histoire de Voltaire,” 80.

³⁰ Ibid., 82–3.

³¹ See Binoche, Bertrand, Les trois sources des philosophies de l'histoire (1764–1798) (Québec, 2008), 32Google Scholar.

³² As Trevor-Roper reminds us, Gibbon himself complained that Voltaire's histories seemed to stubbornly avoid making connections between facts, refusing to accept them even when they were obvious and necessary. Trevor-Roper, “The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment,” 7.

³³ See Binoche, Les trois sources des philosophies de l'histoire, 31.

³⁴ Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (1964) (Evanston, 1981), 86.

³⁵ Voltaire, History of Charles XII (1731) (New York, 1859), 185.

³⁶ Ibid., 447.

³⁷ Unsurprisingly, Voltaire himself encourages this reading of the book. In the Avant-Propos of his dedicated history of Peter the Great, he would describe his biography of Charles with enigmatic flippancy, as “more amusing than instructive.” See Voltaire, “Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand” (1759), in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, vol. 16 (Paris, 1878), 371–639, at 394.

³⁸ See Nordberg, Jöran Anderson, Histoire de Charles XII, roi de Suede, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1742), 1: xiiGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ “Everyone agrees that your book is very well written. This would suffice, one could say, in a novel, where invention dominates; but it is not enough for a history, where truth must rule without question, where one needs strength and nerves more so than grace and flourishes.” La Montraye, quoted in Voltaire, “Notes sur les remarques de la Montraye,” in Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques (Paris, 1957), 355–68, at 355–6, my translation. Original text: “Tout le monde convient que votre livre est très-bien écrit: cela suffirait, dit-on, pour un roman où l'invention domine; mais ce n'est pas assez pour une histoire où la vérité doit régner absolument, où il faut des nerfs et de la force plutôt que des grâces et des fleurs.”

⁴⁰ Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, La voltairomanie (1738) (Exeter, 1983), 6, my translation.

⁴¹ See Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées divers, ed. Édouard Laboulaye, in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, vol. 7 (Paris, 1879), 149–81, at 162.

⁴² See Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire (1789), in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 1 (Paris, 1833), 189–292, at 217.

⁴³ Here, famous German historian August Schlözer offers perhaps the most scathing critique of Voltaire's work: “The painter before he takes up his brush to paint history must not only know it already but ought to be familiar with it. As we are talking about history and not poetry or fiction, he must not draw any line that would not be true and could not be demonstrated to be true by other evidence. Let the painter of history by all means go about his business with fortitude, resolution, refinement, etc. If he does not, above all, paint truthfully, he has no place among the historians. Livy is a charming painter of Rome's first five centuries, but—as can be proved and has already been proved in Paris—he tells us things he could not possibly have known and, therefore, did not know. Il m'importe beaucoup d’être lu, mais il m'importe peu d’être cru, thought Livy, and Voltaire.” August Ludwig Schlözer, “On Historiography” (1783), History and Theory 18/1 (1979), 41–51, at 44.

⁴⁴ White, of course, does remind us that narrative should not be understood as a kind of “ideal” or “natural” state of historical knowledge, and that plenty of important historians chose to abandon narrative modes of writing when the subject of their interests called for it. Still, narrative has remained, since antiquity, a common and often privileged way to produce and preserve knowledge of the past. See White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 2Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ See François Fénelon, Lettre à l'Académie (1714) (Paris, 1864), 63.

⁴⁶ See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), 135–6.

⁴⁷ As recently as 2005, Anne Coudreuse would repeat (in much more schematic fashion) this position of Voltaire as a kind of historien dramaturge. See Anne Coudreuse, Pathétique et pédagogie: La leçon de l'Histoire de Charles XII de Voltaire (Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 99, www.cairn.info/le-bonheur-de-la-litterature--9782130523031-page-99.htm.

⁴⁸ See Gossman, Lionel, “Voltaire's Charles XII: History into Art,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 25 (1963), 691–720Google Scholar, at 691.

⁴⁹ White, Metahistory, 50.

⁵⁰ See Calvino, Italo, Why Read the Classics? (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 228–9.

⁵² The following passage conveys particularly well Voltaire's usage of romanesque elements in his first historical narrative: “At the first discharge of the enemy's muskets, he received a shot in his neck; but as it was a spent ball, it lodged in the folds of his black neckcloth, and did him no harm. His horse was killed under him. M. de Sparr told me that the king mounted another horse with great agility, saying “These fellows make me go through my exercises.” Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 235.

⁵³ Ibid., 261–2.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 425.

⁵⁵ Indeed, Voltaire cannot help but to add some color to this moment: “By way of amusement, he sometimes played at chess; and, as the characters of men are often discovered by the most trifling incidents, it may not be improper to observe, that he always advanced the king first at that game, and made greater use of him than of any of the other men, by which he was always a loser.” Ibid., 333.

⁵⁶ Voltaire, “Histoire.” Original text: “Si deux ou trois historiens seulement avoient écrit l'avanture du roi Charles XII, qui s'obstinant à rester dans les états du sultan son bienfaiteur, malgré lui, se battit avec ses domestiques contre une armée de janissaires & de Tartares, j'aurois suspend mon jugement; mais ayant parlé à plusieurs témoins oculaires, & n'ayant jamais entendu révoquer cette action en doute, il a bien fallu la croire, parce qu'après tout, si elle n'est ni sage, ni ordinaire, elle n'est contraire ni aux loix de la nature, ni au caractere du héros. L'histoire de l'homme au masque de fer auroit passé dans mon esprit pour un roman, si je ne la tenois que du gendre du chirurgien, qui eut soin de cet homme dans sa derniere maladie. Mais l'officier qui le gardoit alors, m'ayant aussi attesté le fait, & tous ceux qui devoient en être instruits me l'ayant confirmé, & les enfans des ministres d’état, dépositaires de ce secret, qui vivent encore, en étant instruits comme moi, j'ai donné à cette histoire un grand dégré de probabilité, dégré pourtant audessous de celui qui fait croire l'affaire de Bender, parce que l'avanture de Bender a eu plus de témoins que celle de l'homme au masque de fer.”

⁵⁷ See Jaucourt, “Roman,” in Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu; Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, “Conte, Fable, Roman,” in Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu.

⁵⁸ I am, of course, not the first to make this claim. In 2006, Gareth Gollrad had already argued that Voltaire's reliance on eyewitnesses in Histoire de Charles XII was a calculated move to disarm accusations of implausibility. More than that, Gollrad reminds us that the modern attacks against Voltaire's trust in such eyewitnesses are, in fact, anachronistic. To claim that Voltaire lacked “historical objectivity” because he failed to account for the biases of his testimonials is to forget that the very notion of “objectivity” was somewhat alien to him. Likewise, to claim that Voltaire did not account for the influence of discourse (récit) (and how it might shape his testimonial's idea of the truth) is to forget that, to him, the historian's work was always (and precisely) constrained by the perspective of others. Much like a judge, the historian could only get a partial view of things based on his witnesses’ testimonials and had to form a cohesive and complete picture of historical affairs using his or her own imagination and common sense. See Gareth Gollrad, “Le siècle de Louis XIV: Tableau et témoignage,” in Voltaire et le grand Siècle 2006/10 (2006), 39–61, at 44–5.

⁵⁹ Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 381.

⁶⁰ Coudreuse, Pathétique et pédagogie, 100.

⁶¹ Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII (1731), in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 16 (Paris, 1878), 13–368, at 351. I have chosen to do my own translation of the original text here to remain close to Voltaire's vocabulary. The English translation of Histoire de Charles XII that I have been using throughout this article, while overall excellent, takes a few too many liberties with this line and translates “bien au delà du vraisemblable” as “border(ing) on the marvellous.”

⁶² Editorial note in Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 388. Original text: “M. Nordberg, qui n’était pas présent à cet événement, n'a fait que suivre ici dans son histoire celle de M. de Voltaire; mais il l'a tronquée, il en a supprimé les circonstances intéressantes, et n'a pu justifier la témérité de Charles XII.” Voltaire, “Histoire de Charles XII,” 302.

⁶³ See Nordberg, Histoire de Charles XII, 3: 63–7.

⁶⁴ Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 388.

⁶⁵ Here I am referring to the often-quoted introduction to “Le siècle de Louis XIV,” where Voltaire states that the Sun King's reign was so unique that only three other “ages” in mankind's history (Alexander's Greece, Augustus’ Rome, and the European Renaissance) ever came close to matching its contributions to culture. See Voltaire, “Le siècle de Louis XIV” (1751), in Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, 605–1274, at 616.

⁶⁶ See Edelstein, Dan, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010), 31–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 36.

⁶⁸ See ibid., 33.

⁶⁹ Nicholas Cronk has effectively argued that these interests emerge as early as Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques (in the late 1720s), themselves a prototype for the “cultural histories” that the Enlightenment—and Voltaire himself—would popularize. See Nicholas Cronk, “Introduction,” in Voltaire, Lettres sur les anglais (Voltaire Foundation, Les Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, vol. 6A(I)) (Oxford, 2022), 78–85.

⁷⁰ As the famous lines go: “Ce n'est pas seulement la vie de Louis XIV qu'on prétend écrire; on se propose un plus grand objet. On veut essayer de peindre à la postérité, non les actions d'un seul homme, mais l'esprit des hommes dans le siècle le plus éclairé qui fut jamais.” Voltaire, “Le siècle de Louis XIV,” 616.

⁷¹ The following passage (from Book III) places Voltaire very far from any satirical spirit: “It is hard to say how far this young conqueror might have carried his resentment and his arms, had fortune favored his designs. At that time nothing appeared impossible to him. He had even sent several officers privately into Asia and Egypt, to take plans of the towns, and to examine into the strength of those countries. Certain it is, that if ever a prince was able to overturn the empire of the Turks and Persians, and from thence pass into Italy, it was Charles XII. He was as young as Alexander, as brave, as enterprising, more indefatigable, more robust, and more temperate; and the Swedes, perhaps, were better soldiers than the Macedonians. But such projects, which are called divine when they succeed, are regarded only as chimeras when they prove abortive.” Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 298–9.

⁷² Here I am explicitly following Pierre Force's general theory about Voltairean history. As he has demonstrated, Voltaire's distinction between “ancient” and “modern” history was neither qualitative (that is, a distinction between a “bad” and a “good” history) nor merely chronological (that is, a distinction between “epochs”). Rather, it was a rhetorical, poetic, and imaginative distinction between two different ways of interpreting and representing the world. To the philosophe, the recent past was the only period in which it was possible to speak of historical phenomena without slipping into the conventions of myth and the language of epic poetry. The further one walked backwards in time, the harder it was to keep the two apart. In this article, I have sought to bolster this position by adding one bit of nuance to it, namely that Charles XII seems to sit precisely at the cusp of that transition and that his history largely underscores the transition itself. See Pierre Force, “Voltaire and the Necessity of Modern History,” Modern Intellectual History 6/3 (2009), 457–84.

⁷³ Geffroy, Auguste, “Le Charles XII de Voltaire et le Charles XII de l'histoire,” Revue des deux mondes 84 (1869), 360–90Google Scholar, at 361.

⁷⁴ In using the word “shock,” I am of course gesturing towards Larry Norman's famous study of Enlightenment historical aesthetics. As he suggests there, the literary experience of antiquity in the eighteenth century was very much defined by its ability to produce shock in audiences. More specifically, Norman understands “shock” itself as the effect of gazing upon a world rendered remote (if not unrecognizable) by the passage of time, an effect that can be modulated either negatively (in which case “shock” becomes “revulsion”) or positively (in which case “shock” becomes “awe” or “longing”). See Norman, Larry F., The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ See Voltaire, “Histoire,” my translations.

⁷⁶ Voltaire, History of Charles XII, 448.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 448.